


The Boy from Okinawa

by beccerslynnfics



Category: SK8 the Infinity (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Deviates From Canon, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Episode AU: Adam the Matador of Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-19 08:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 47,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29623221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beccerslynnfics/pseuds/beccerslynnfics
Summary: This is an alternative to what happens at the end of Sk8 the Infinity's anime episode 4. No spoilers so this description is brief!
Relationships: Hasegawa Langa & Kyan Reki, Hasegawa Langa/Kyan Reki
Comments: 93
Kudos: 196





	1. Another Bite

**Author's Note:**

> Be aware this fic has spoilers for Episode 4 of Sk8 the Infinity! I'm basically putting the summary here instead of in the summary box, but in this AU Reki doesn't wake up right away after ADAM's Love Hug and Langa is stressed about it. The boys'll go through a lot of twists and turns! I'm planning for this fic to be 14 chapters, which I can hopefully post twice a week, but that might change. The title of the story also may change! I hope you enjoy!

“Reki!” Langa screamed as he watched the skater in front of him lose control and crash as ADAM’s Love Hug played out before his eyes. The deafening crunch of Reki’s head making contact with the hard rock of the S course’s side walls sent an electrifying jolt through Langa’s entire body. He slid to a stop in front of Reki, who was crumpled over on the side of the course, pressed up against the wall and unmoving. 

“Reki! Hey!” Langa screamed again, pawing carefully at Reki’s body. With no response, Langa crept forward and scooped Reki’s head into his lap. “Hey! Hey!” Langa whispered again, tapping at Reki’s cheeks. He showed no signs of waking up, and a small trail of blood began to creep down his forehead and dampen his already fiery-red hair. Langa felt paralyzed with fear and uncertainty, just watching the blood drip down into Reki’s eyes without a single plan of action popping into his head.

“Yo!” a voice shouted, ripping Langa’s attention away from Reki and up to the course again. ADAM had already disappeared, either to finish the course or gloat in his success, but Shadow sat with his head hanging out of the driver’s side window of the flower shop van, Miya clambering out of the passenger side next to him. Shadow threw out another call to action as Miya ran over to where Langa sat with Reki.

“Let’s go,” Miya said, scooping Reki’s head into his own hands. “He needs to go to a hospital.”

“I got him,” Langa said, surprised at the level of defensiveness that had quickly worked its way into his tone. Miya backed away as Langa scooped Reki into his arms and stepped into the back of the van. 

The team raced to the hospital and Reki was seen to right away, but the uneasiness in Langa’s body just kept skyrocketing. Langa sat at his bedside after the doctors and nurses had fussed over him, Reki’s arm and head both bandaged, and stared at him, praying for his eyes to open. At the sight of Reki’s mother walking into the room, Langa’s heart rate elevated twofold. 

“What happened?” his mother asked frantically, and with a bit of iciness in her voice, but she hugged Langa as she reached the bedside and a bit of his jumpiness subsided.

Langa had no real way to explain what had happened without tipping Reki’s mother off to the illegal habits that he participated in nightly, but he didn’t have to think of an excuse because the doctor soon joined them in the room. Langa stood up to leave and give them some privacy, but Reki’s mother nodded for him to stay as she sat down.

“You’re Reki’s mother, I presume,” the doctor said before launching into an explanation of Reki’s injuries. “Your son has a broken arm and has suffered a small amount of head trauma. It isn’t too serious, but it may take some time for him to awaken. Once he does, we’ll have to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t have any serious symptoms.”

Reki’s mother nodded and thanked the doctor, then turned to Langa after he left the room. Her eyes seemed to bore into Langa’s, but she didn’t press any further about how he had ended up this way. 

“Thank you for being here with my son,” was all she said, and Langa left her alone to be with Reki for the rest of the night.

***

The next few days were filled with tension for Langa, and even hanging out with Miya and Shadow didn’t help. He would spend all his time at school just staring at the clock, waiting for the day to be over, so he could meet up with them at the hospital and check-in on Reki. There had been a few times Reki had moved a bit in his sleep while Langa was visiting, but he hadn’t woken up yet. 

Now, Langa was working on some homework at Reki’s bedside while Miya and Shadow were pouring over some of Reki’s old notes, trying to see if they could pull off any modifications to Langa’s skateboard before the beef with ADAM tonight. It was the last place Langa wanted to be, and he tried to make it the last thing on his mind, but he had made a promise to race if Reki had lost. 

Miya sighed and looked up, distracting Langa from his homework. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do with only this much time left,” he said deflatedly. “Reki’s the true mechanic out of all of us. Anything we do now might harm more than help.”

“Thanks for trying,” Langa said back, offering the best smile he could manage. As Miya and Shadow stood and began packing up their things, Langa closed his book and tossed it into his bag. “Will you guys be there tonight?”

“We wouldn’t miss it,” Shadow said with a wave behind his head as he started to leave the room. “Just wish Reki could be there, too.”

“It’s probably best that he isn’t,” Miya countered, then blushed after Langa offered him a quizzical glance. “What I mean is, he would be way too worried about you getting hurt for his own good.”

Langa sighed and nodded, turning to look at Reki sleeping peacefully beside him. The others said their goodbyes and headed out, but he decided to linger for a moment and talk to Reki.

“You might not be able to hear me, but I promise I’ll make you proud tonight. I’ll take on ADAM in your honor and I’ll skate the best I ever have,” Langa said quietly before standing up and starting to collect his things. 

As he swung his bag over his shoulder and began heading for the door, a quiet cough sounded behind him and Langa whipped around to face the bed.

“I wanna be there,” Reki said quietly, struggling to lift his head off the pillow.

“Reki!” Langa dove back towards the bed, his bag skidding across the floor, and clasped Reki’s hand. 

Reki sat up with effort and began looking around the room, then down at his arm. A sense of disorientation seemed to register in his eyes as he turned to look at Langa.

“It’s been a few days since your beef with ADAM,” Langa began to explain, pulling up a chair and sitting down. “I don’t know how much you remember, but he did his Love Hug and you lost control of your board.”

Reki’s eyes opened wide as he recalled the panic of that moment, and he leaned back against the pillow again. He began to rub at the bandages on his arm as Langa continued.

“You hit your head pretty hard and you broke your arm, so the doctor said you might have some head trauma. I should probably go tell them you’re awake actually, so they can check for symptoms and stuff.”

“Wait!” Reki grabbed Langa’s arm as he stood. “If I can convince them I’m fine, I _am_ coming with you tonight.”

“You heard us talking about it?”

“It’s tonight right?”

Langa sighed, then nodded. He left the room without giving Reki an answer, but he waited in the hallway as a doctor and a nurse went in and talked with Reki. Around half an hour later, the doctor left, and Reki came out with the nurse a few minutes after that. He had changed out of his hospital robe and was wearing his typical hoodie and jeans, his injured arm in a sling around his neck and his bandana covering the bandages across his forehead. Reki walked up to Langa with confidence and smiled widely at him.

“Let’s go!”

Langa shook his head, but he didn’t protest. The two skaters left the hospital and began walking slowly, Langa sneaking glances at Reki as they went to make sure he was steady on his feet.

“I have to stop at my house and grab my board, I haven’t been keeping it on me lately. You should call your mom and tell her you’ve been discharged.”

“Right!” Reki nodded, then pulled out his cell phone and began dialing. 

Reki and his mother talked for a while, her voice frantic and loud enough that Langa could hear it even though he tried to keep his distance. When they reached Langa’s house, Reki was still on the phone, so Langa motioned for him to sit down on the porch outside and raced in to grab his board. When Langa returned, Reki had hung up the phone and was now sitting with a concerned look on his face. He smiled when he noticed Langa.

“My mom wants me home right now,” he confessed. “But I told her I had to be somewhere really important. She wasn’t too happy, but she trusts me. I feel a little guilty.” He laughed sheepishly.

Langa didn’t offer a response, partly because he agreed with Reki’s mother, but he pushed his opinions to the back of his mind and offered Reki a hand up. They walked around to the side of the house and hopped on Langa’s bike, then headed off to the S course’s starting point. 

When they got there, ADAM himself was standing at the starting line, waiting. He smiled at the sight of Langa, but his smile grew even wider as Reki came into view. He quickly closed the distance between them and placed a hand on Reki’s shoulder, making him flinch visibly enough that Langa noticed.

“Back away, now,” Langa said forcefully to ADAM as he shoved between the two of them and stepped in front of Reki.

“Easy, Snow,” ADAM said back, raising his hands playfully. “I’m just happy to see that my little hors-d’oeuvre hasn’t been finished off quite yet. I’m still hungry enough that I could take another bite before the main dish!” ADAM winked, sending a shiver down Langa’s spine. He turned to see that Reki had taken a few steps back. 

“You okay?” Langa whispered to him as ADAM began to separate from them. Reki just nodded, his eyes fixed on ADAM as he took his place at the starting line. 

Langa slowly approached the starting line and set his board down on the ground as Reki found a place in the audience with Cherry, Miya and Shadow. He placed one foot on the board and began rocking it back and forth, making sure that the trucks and wheels still moved together smoothly.

“Langa!” Reki called from the crowd, then started running over.

“Walk, Reki, walk!” Langa chastised him, unable to help from jumping to conclusions. “What is it?”

“Lemme see your board.” Reki squatted down on the ground and flipped the board over, taking the small wrench off of his belt and wriggling it around a bit. “There!” He beamed up at Langa as he flipped the board back over. “It looked like you had a few loose parts, I’m glad I checked.”

“Thanks,” Langa smiled back, then offered Reki a hand up. “Now get back over to the rest of the crowd, you’re in a dangerous spot for a spectator.”

“Indeed, he is!” ADAM, who had been observing quietly, suddenly shouted. 

In a rapid flash of movement, ADAM closed both arms around Reki’s cast and pulled him closer to himself, causing Reki to step onto Langa’s board in order to avoid tripping over it. Reki cried out in pain, but ADAM’s grip only tightened, and then he shot forward, pulling Reki on Langa’s board along with him. 

ADAM turned his head back with a flair of exaggeration and winked suggestively at Langa as he sped down the track with Reki. Rage exploded across Langa’s body almost as tangibly as physical pain, and Langa couldn’t even feel the ground beneath his feet as he started to cross the starting line. All he could focus on was Reki’s form, getting smaller and smaller as the distance between them grew.


	2. Rhythm

In only a matter of seconds, Reki was already far out of Langa’s sight. He ran anyway, wind slapping against his face and pouring iciness into his lungs. Reki’s screams, out of panic or pain Langa couldn’t bear to wonder, were the only signal that he was still up ahead. 

Langa took the curves and slants of the S course at a breakneck speed, not even caring that he might lose his balance in the course designed for the slick and speedy maneuverability of skateboards. More than once, he almost crashed into the jagged rock just beyond a sharp turn or tripped over the outer edge of the course as he failed to slow his speed. He made it around each corner just in time to see the bright red fire of both Reki’s hair and Adam’s extravagant costume disappear around the next. It was agony, and he began to match Reki’s screams with his own. 

“Langa!” Miya called to him as Langa finally gave up the chase, sinking to his knees and gasping for breath. He looked up to see the flower shop van approaching from behind, Miya’s head sticking out of the passenger side window. The car rolled to a stop and Langa mustered up his remaining energy to slide open the back door and crawl inside, then Shadow sped off down the S course in an attempt to catch up to the two skaters ahead. 

Before long, the vehicle had done what Langa’s desperate manpower had not, and they were closing the distance on ADAM’s dangerous performance. Langa leaned forward between the two front seats, subconsciously gripping Miya’s chair with almost superhuman effort. 

As they kept getting closer, ADAM’s flashiness kept increasing. He spun Reki around on Langa’s board over and over again, pulling him up by his cast each time he lost his balance and began to topple over. Reki had absolutely no control of the unusual set-up of Langa’s board, unaccustomed to the modifications he had made to allow Langa to use it like a snowboard. ADAM kept pressing himself close to Reki as well, making Reki close his eyes and shudder, essentially admitting defeat and letting himself be tossed around like a doll.

“Reki, fight!” Langa called out of Miya’s open window, but Reki made no sign that he had heard him. ADAM had, though, and he leaned over to begin whispering into Reki’s ear. 

As the chase continued, Reki’s knees began to shake, his center of gravity dropping closer and closer to the ground the longer ADAM’s face lingered close to his. He stooped lower and lower, ADAM towering over him and managing perfect control of both his board and Reki’s through his grasp on Reki’s arm. ADAM looked up and finally locked eyes with Langa as he pulled Reki through the door of the abandoned factory, the most dangerous section of the course. The two were bathed in darkness for a moment, before the cold lights inside illuminated them once again. ADAM smiled coyly at Langa, then gave Reki’s arm a crushing squeeze and let go.

“I think I’ve had my fill for the night,” he said calmly, turning to survey the terror on Reki’s face. Tears were welling up at the corners of his eyes and he was swaying back and forth, almost about to pass out from the pain ADAM had inflicted on his system relentlessly. ADAM leaned forward and whispered into his ear one more time before giving him a light push forward, then pulled to the side of the course as Reki spun away from him. “I’m ready for the main dish now,” he shouted confidently at Langa as the van sailed past him.

“Step on the gas!” Langa screamed at Shadow, pulling back to open the door beside him. Reki was spinning wildly in front of them, veering to the left of the walkway the S course ran on, and Langa hoped to catch up and pull him inside the car while he was still moving.

But the walkway was a  _ walk- _ way, and a sudden lurching sound made Shadow yank his foot off the gas pedal. Reki kept moving while they slowly rolled to a stop.

“What are you doing?!” Langa yelled, scrambling forward to look at the k.p.h. gauge.

“This car is too heavy for the walkway, it’s made for people!” Shadow yelled back, and Langa clambered out of the car and started running again.

“Find your balance, Reki!” Langa screamed frantically, then called Reki’s name again and searched for any sign Reki had heard him.

But the adrenaline that had been keeping Reki on his feet and resistant to the pain until then had dissipated as soon as ADAM had relaxed his hold. Langa felt a heaviness like lead begin to set in his legs as he watched Reki’s eyes droop, then close as his head tilted and his body began to curve backwards. The board slid out from under him as he finally fell, the boy and the board shooting to opposite sides of the walkway. The board rolled off the edge and fell to the factory floor below, while Reki’s back made a hard impact with a section of railing on the walkway.

Langa froze as the railing, rusty and brittle after years of neglect, bent and cracked under the pressure of impact, then tore away from the walkway. Reki continued to fall backwards, his limp body picking up speed as he crashed downwards, sending Langa crumbling to his knees as he watched, helpless. 

Langa couldn’t process anything, couldn’t feel his hands pressed against the cold metal of the walkway or sense the wetness on his cheeks as tears poured out of his eyes, nor even understand the muffled sounds that were flooding into his ears as if they were breaking through some kind of wall. Finally, a hand touched his shoulder and pulled him up, and Langa realized Shadow and Miya were with him, calling his name and pulling him forward. 

“There’s a ladder down to the main floor!” Shadow screamed into his ear, dragging him along until Langa found his sense of gravity again. 

He shook his head to clear it, then moved like lightning across the walkway to the rusted ladder. He no longer had the caution to care if the ladder broke on his descent, and climbed down as fast as his body could move. When Langa reached the floor below, he almost faltered at what he saw, but Miya coming down after him snapped him out of it and got him moving again. 

Reki’s fall had caused chaos among the abandoned equipment below, and he had paid the price for it. He was lying motionless among a pile of now-useless equipment and pieces of pillars that had once helped to hold up the walkway. The top of a large pillar lay across his right leg, another one rested on top of his broken arm and jutted out onto his chest, and a small support beam that had connected the two had fallen across Reki’s forehead and submerged the top half of his face in a dark mixture of shadow and debris. 

“Reki…?” Miya croaked, shakiness beginning to course over his body. He slumped down next to Langa, who was kneeling at Reki’s side but frozen in place, his hands raised in front of him to begin to act, but shaking too much to move an inch.

“Get the pillars off of him!” a voice reverberated across the large factory space, and Miya and Langa both jolted up to see Joe and Cherry running through the main floor entrance. Shadow came trailing behind them, having backed the car up and relocated it to ground-level outside the factory. “Now!” Joe shouted again as they got closer, and Langa fell backwards in shock.

As Joe reached the boys clustered around Reki and began pulling at the beams, directing Langa how to work with him to handle their heavy weight, Cherry pulled Miya back and out of the way. A bit of clarity began to flow back into Langa’s mind as Joe put him to work, and Cherry began speaking in a calm tone, distracting all of them from going into a panic. 

“We were on our way over to catch the second half of Langa’s beef with ADAM when we heard some guys who were leaving talking about a redhead kid. We knew it was Reki,” Cherry said quietly, rubbing Miya’s back as he continued to tremble. “We figured they would be close to the factory, but we pulled up the livestream and saw everything. We got here as fast as we could, but it wasn’t fast enough…”

Joe and Langa had managed to clear away the beams and other small debris that had been scattered across Reki’s body while Cherry spoke, and Joe now held Langa back with one hand as he fought to get closer to Reki’s body. Cherry grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back to sit with Miya.

“What are you doing? We need to call an ambulance!” Langa began to pull at Cherry’s arm, but he and Joe just exchanged looks.

“We… can’t do that,” Joe said before moving slowly to place two fingers up against the side of Reki’s neck, checking his pulse. 

“What?!” Langa roared and pulled against Cherry’s grip.

“If we call the police, the S course is done for,” Cherry whispered quietly. “We’d become enemy number one of anyone who participates in this, and we could end up getting a lot of people in trouble. We have to get Reki to the hospital on our own, just like last time.” 

“It’s true,” Joe said as he pulled away from Reki’s neck. “Look, everyone’s cleared out in case the cops show up.” 

Langa hadn’t registered the atmosphere during the race, but he did know that people usually liked to hang out on the ground floor of the factory to watch the skaters compete. He looked up, and their group were the only ones there. Even ADAM had disappeared to enjoy the rest of his night of victory alone. 

“Okay,” he whispered. “I promise I’ll be calm.” Cherry nodded and released his grip, allowing Langa to sit down across from Joe on the other side of Reki’s body. 

“He has a pulse and he’s breathing,” Joe informed him. “Let’s just take this slow, so we don’t hurt him any more. With these pillars, he probably has some broken bones at the very least. Let’s support his head first before we try to move him.”

“Mmm.” Langa nodded. His body was still trembling, but he steeled his will and leaned forward to inspect Reki’s body. 

Reki’s hair was matted with blood, the white parts of his bandana tinged red with its color. It dripped down over his eyes, just like it had before, but tonight there was much, much more. Reki’s clothes concealed much of the other damage that his body had taken, but the fabric of his right pants’ leg was torn and stained red as well, especially below the knee.

“Oh, Reki…” Langa breathed, then rubbed his hand softly over the injured boy’s cheek. Reki didn’t stir, so Langa scooted forward and slowly scooped his head into his arms. Langa’s body went rigid, though, as Reki gasped and coughed up blood. It flecked Langa’s white shirt, and Langa felt all of the warmth leave his own body at the sight of it. 

“Don’t move another muscle, Langa,” Cherry called, leaning towards him as Joe shifted to hover over Reki’s body. Langa couldn’t say anything in response, just stared at the drops of blood scattered across Reki’s now pale skin. 

“Let me take him,” Joe said, placing one arm underneath Reki’s head. “I’ll get him to the car.”

Langa watched silently as Joe scooped up Reki’s legs with delicate movement, then hoisted him into the air without shifting Reki’s body around at all. He stepped slowly, deliberately, around the remaining debris in the room and began to head towards the exit, where Shadow had returned to the flower shop van, waiting with the engine running. 

“Come on, Langa,” Miya said, extending a hand to pull Langa up. “Reki needs you.” 

For a moment, Langa felt too weak to move, as if he might pass out himself. A memory of training with Reki flashed through his mind, when he had swooned at the sight of a few drops of blood from a cut he had received. Now, it was everywhere. It was all he could see. But he couldn’t let that stop him from making sure Reki was okay.

“Right,” he said shakily, and took Miya’s hand. He didn’t even feel it as he was pulled up to his feet, his head spinning, but he stood firm once he was upright. 

Miya began to rush towards Cherry and Joe, who was moving quickly now but doing his best to support Reki’s body, so Langa followed. He stared at Joe’s back, at Reki’s feet, the only part of him that he could see, dangling from Joe’s arms and dripping blood onto the concrete floor below. Langa stiffened, but then followed the trail it left. As he tried to focus on anything other than the blood on the floor, Langa noticed Cherry and Joe talking in hushed voices. He strained his ears to hear. He needed to know anything that could be about Reki.

“It’s probably his lungs,” Cherry whispered. “Listen to the way he’s breathing.”

“It’s soft, but yes, I think you’re right.” Joe nodded slowly, then quickened his pace.

Langa looked down at the flecks of blood across his shirt, then up again to notice Cherry glancing back at him. He quickly shifted his gaze back to Joe and lowered his voice further, but Langa thought he could make out what he said: “It was when Langa picked him up. He was too panicked to be careful.” 

Langa hung his head as he continued walking, making it to the car a few paces behind the others. Cherry slid open the back door and gestured for Langa to crawl inside.

“You need to act as Reki’s pillow, Langa. Joe has to be careful with how he gets him in here, so we need you to support his head. Joe can lay him down across your lap and then scoot in under his legs.”

“Are you sure you trust me?” Langa’s voice wobbled as he locked eyes with Cherry, and Cherry’s face paled. 

“You heard what I said to Joe just now, didn’t you?” He sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “Look, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not blaming you. You should know we don’t have time for this right now. Reki needs you to take care of him, and I know you can do that, so get in the car.”

Langa followed Cherry’s orders, despite the self-doubt spinning through his head, and scooted into his spot in the car. His body was rigid as he waited for Joe to rest Reki’s head in his lap. He kept his hands at his sides, pulling at the loose pieces of thread that rimmed his jeans pockets, his eyes closed, until he felt the warmth and the weight of Reki’s head in his lap. He looked up and Joe was sitting close to him, Reki’s torso across his legs. Miya sat next to Joe with Reki’s legs in his lap. He was pressing a towel against Reki’s bleeding leg, and Joe handed another one to Langa.

“For his head.”

“Oh, right.”

Langa looked down at Reki’s face, illuminated in the neon of the streetlights outside. Blood was still flowing continuously from several gashes underneath his bandana and he still looked deathly pale, yet Reki’s face seemed more peaceful now. He wasn’t smiling, but there was a softness to the way his lips curled which suggested he wasn’t aware of the pain, instead kept away from it by some sort of pleasant dream. Langa leaned forward and pressed the towel against his clammy skin, then began brushing his hair away from his face as he tried to calm himself down. 

“I’m sorry, Reki,” he whispered as he leaned closer. “I should’ve kept my guard up around ADAM. I shouldn’t have even let you come with me. I shouldn’t have accepted the beef in the first place. You knew what you were talking about when you told me not to, and now you’re paying the price for me.”

Joe and Miya looked away as Langa let tears begin to fall, burying his face in his arm to shield himself from them. Joe reached out and gripped Langa’s shoulder comfortingly as Cherry climbed into the front and Shadow revved the engine. 

As they pulled onto the road and picked up speed, Langa let his hand rest across Reki’s chest. Cherry and Joe were right, there was something not quite right about the way Reki was breathing. His breaths were rapid and shallow, despite how soft they were. But Langa knew that if he fixated on that, and on the fact that he might have contributed to its cause, he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on holding onto hope. So he moved his hand across Reki’s chest, to the spot where he knew his heart was, and felt the pulsing of each beat. He breathed in sync with the beating, and smiled as his nerves steadied to the rhythm of Reki’s heart. 


	3. If I Can Be of Some Use

The pitch black night creeping through the waiting room window terrified Langa for the first time since he had been a young child. The moonless sky seemed to reach through the window’s glass and wrap around his heart, sending stabs of pain through his chest with each squeeze. He turned to face the waiting room instead, dimly lit in response to the late hour of the night, but the anxiety lingered. 

Langa was alone. Joe, Cherry, and the others had vanished almost as soon as they had arrived and handed Reki’s limp form over to the hospital staff. Each had offered Langa a pained, apologetic glance before leaving the hospital and heading their separate ways. If they had all remained, the group would have stuck out like a sore thumb and attracted too much attention. Langa turned to the empty seat beside him and cursed the S rule about maintaining anonymity outside the course. It was for everyone’s safety, but right now Reki’s safety was the only thing that mattered. 

It had been several hours since Reki had been taken away, and Langa had exhausted himself pacing back and forth, debating whether he should leave to get Reki’s mother or let her find out the shocking news by herself when she heard the message from the hospital on her answering machine in the morning. The image of Reki waking up alone had popped into his head, and that had been enough for him to slump into a seat and decide to stay. And that was where he sat now, the guilt eating away at him.

“Excuse me,” a quiet voice said from a few paces away, and Langa looked up. A short, petite woman in nurse’s scrubs stood with various items held in her arms. She outstretched a hand. “You’re Kyan Reki-san’s friend, right? I have a few of his possessions here that it might be best for you to hang onto until his family is able to be here…”

“Oh, right…” 

Langa straightened up as the nurse walked forward and handed off the small bundle to him. The nurse turned to exit the waiting room again. 

“Um, wait! How is Reki doing? Will I be able to see him soon?”

The nurse turned around and smiled brightly. “I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve brought him to a room.” She waved awkwardly and quickly moved out into the hall.

Langa sighed and looked down at the things the nurse had deposited in his lap. Reki’s wallet, keys, cell phone, and the small wrench that he constantly had attached to his belt loop. Langa picked it up and ran his thumb over the cool metal, then flipped it over between his fingers until the heat from his hands began to warm it up. He let it fall to his lap again. 

The impact of the wrench’s landing made Reki’s phone screen light up to reveal a message from his mother. It had been sent earlier in the evening, around the time ADAM’s mischief had started. It read: _“I’m sorry for lecturing you on the phone earlier. I just wanted you to be safe. I’m always asleep when you get home, so I’m saying goodnight now. Don’t stay out too late! I love you.”_

Langa stifled a sob as the guilt that had been pressing down on him throughout the night circled around for another wave, and he picked up the phone to look at the message more closely. As he did, his thumb hit the screen and Reki’s lock screen disappeared, his phone unlocked.

“Gosh, Reki, no password on your phone? You’re too trusting,” Langa breathed quietly. 

He let his eyes scan loosely over the list of apps on the home screen, until they caught on the small app with a picture of an analog telephone as its logo. Without really thinking, Langa clicked on the app and was met with a list of Reki’s frequent contacts. A small electric spark ran through him to see his name first on the list, but just below his name was Reki’s mother, and Langa’s heart sank just as quickly. His fingers moved before his thoughts finished processing, and before he knew it, he was pressing the phone up to his ear.

“Reki? It’s almost two a.m. sweetie, what are you doing still out? You should be at home, in bed, like the rest of your family.”

“It’s Langa, actually…”

There was silence on the other end of the line, suggesting that Reki’s mother knew exactly what was going on before Langa said anything more. After a moment, he proceeded anyway.

“It’s me calling because Reki got hurt again. I’m…” Langa clapped a hand over his mouth to keep a sob from emerging, then pulled the phone away from his ear to breathe deeply. “I’m really sorry,” he said shakily as he brought it to his ear again. “He insisted on coming with me to take care of some things I had to do tonight, and I should have made him go home. I was irresponsible and selfish, wanting to just have him by my side like usual.”

“How bad is it?” Reki’s mother said after a moment, quietly.

“I’m at the hospital, but I haven’t seen him yet. I don’t think they’ll tell me, since I’m not family.”

“I…” Reki’s mother paused, her voice catching in her throat. “I don’t think I can handle this, at least not tonight. I’ve been tearing myself to pieces with worry over that boy, and if I see him now, I might not be able to manage. His sisters are all worried sick… to the point where the twins are sleeping in my bed like they used to do when they were younger and had bad dreams. I can’t drag them to the hospital with me in the middle of the night and put them through more pain, and…”

The pace of her speech was beginning to quicken, a sort of panic setting in that was evident to Langa just from the sound of her voice. 

“I understand,” he said quietly, though he had no idea. He couldn’t imagine the kind of twisting, carving knife this was in the heart of Reki’s mother, no matter how badly it felt like a sword had pierced his own. Even though it was a blatant lie, his words seemed to reassure her.

“Langa,” she began to cry freely. “Honestly, I’m a little mad at you right now for how vague you’re being about what you two were doing, but you’ve been such a good friend to my Reki. He trusts you in a way he hasn’t trusted people in such a long time. Can you be there for him, for me?”

“Yes,” Langa said confidently, rising to his feet and clutching Reki’s things to his chest. “Please take the time you need to process this and make sure your family is okay. I won’t leave his side until you’re ready to see him.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice almost fading out over the phone. She breathed deep, then continued in a louder voice. “I still want to know everything, so I’m going to call the hospital and tell them it’s okay to talk to you. Please keep me updated.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you, Langa.”

He heard a short click as Reki’s mother hung up the phone, and he was alone in the waiting room again. Or so he thought. He looked up to see the same nurse standing at the entryway, just outside the long hall that led to patients’ rooms.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Um, yes!” Langa scrambled to wipe at his eyes, which were brimming with tears, then dropped his hands to his sides and stuffed Reki’s things into his pockets.

“If you’re ready to see him, I think it’s okay now. He’s ready.”

Langa nodded enthusiastically despite his yo-yoing emotions, and he followed as the nurse gestured for him to come forward and start walking down the hall. His heart was already beginning to lighten, feeling less like a heavy weight in his chest. The nurse made it sound like Reki was doing well, awake and maybe even moving around a bit. He felt a smile begin to creep onto his face as he trailed behind the nurse, and pictured calling Reki’s mother up to share the news with her.

“Is he asleep?” Langa whispered as the nurse led him into a dark room.

He stayed by the door as she moved around the room, light from the hallway barely illuminating her silhouette as she moved over to a window that Langa hadn’t noticed. She drew back the curtains to let in more of the pitch black night that had been suffocating him all night.

“Oh, I forgot it was a new moon tonight,” the nurse huffed, the distraction making her forget his question. She looked up and noticed Langa standing stiffly by the door. “Come, sit down,” she murmured as she approached him again.

She tapped his shoulder lightly before flipping on the lightswitch behind him, then retreated to the hallway and began to close the door behind her. 

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to speak with the doctor, and I’ll let you know what I’m allowed to tell you when I get back, okay?” 

Langa turned to face the room as the door shut behind him, and his gaze was instantly drawn to the bed. Langa almost tripped as he started to move towards it, but he managed to make it to the chair the nurse had placed at the bedside.

“Reki?” Langa breathed quietly as he slumped into the chair and took hold of Reki’s right hand. 

An IV had been inserted into one of the veins stretching across the back of his hand, and as Langa watched the tube trail up to a bag hanging above the bed, he took in the rest of Reki’s body. A thick blanket had been pulled high up on his chest, but his left arm rested atop it, bandaged in a thicker cast than it had been before. The blanket had been pulled away from his right leg, which was also in a cast and was elevated by a large cushion-like block of foam. 

Langa hesitated before looking up to Reki’s face, recalling the beam that had landed on his forehead. He sighed and let his eyes trail upwards. Reki’s face was as pale as it had been when Langa and the others found him. His characteristic bandana was gone, along with the old bandages it had been concealing. In their place, fresh white bandages were wrapped around Reki’s head and over his right eye, sending a jolt down Langa’s spine. His only comfort was seeing Reki’s shock of red hair peeking out from between the bandages. Small tubes were pressed into Reki’s nose.

Langa felt too overcome to say anything, and just stared at the tubes. They trailed across Reki’s cheeks and disappeared behind his ears, only to appear again and come together beneath his chin. Langa pulled Reki’s hand up to his cheek and leaned against it, the coldness of his skin only doing more to make Langa’s uneasiness surge.

The door behind him opened, but Langa made no move to snap to attention. Steps reverberated across the tile floor, and a presence soon stood next to him, a shadow looming over Reki’s face. 

“That tubing is what we call a nasal cannula. Most people don’t know what it’s called,” a comforting voice said, and Langa felt a delicate touch on his shoulder. He looked up expecting to see the nurse, but a woman in a doctor’s white coat stood next to him. She smiled. “It’s helping Reki to breathe properly by delivering oxygen to his lungs.”

Langa didn’t say anything, but turned to look at Reki’s face again. He pulled Reki’s hand away from his face and folded his own hands around it as he laid it back down on the bed.

“I’m Reki’s doctor,” the woman continued. “You must be his friend Langa. I just got off the phone with his mother, and she told me a bit about you. You must be a very responsible kid, because she insisted that I overlook the way we do things around here to talk to you. Luckily I was able to calm her down enough to explain the extent of Reki’s injuries to her, so I won’t actually be risking my job if I share the details with you now.”

The doctor laughed, and Langa felt himself relaxing a bit by just being in her presence.

“So,” she traversed to the other side of the bed and sat down in a chair across from Langa. “As you can see from the cast, Reki’s leg has been pretty extensively shattered. His arm, too, though I understand that was broken before. It will take a long time for those injuries to heal and there were some spots where we had to put some rods in. If all goes well, we should be able to take those out again down the line to reduce Reki’s long-term pain.

“Reki’s pretty lucky his head didn’t turn out the same way,” she continued, leaning forward. “He only has some minor head trauma, we’ll call it something like a concussion. Only a small fraction of that object’s weight landed on his head. He’s got some pretty ugly gashes which required stitching, but that’s about the worst of it.”

She eyed Langa skeptically after her explanation, as if silently asking him to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding Reki’s injuries. He hadn’t explained much when they had arrived.

“What about his eye?” Langa asked quietly.

“Oh, that? One of the gashes just barely reaches onto his eyelid. We’ll keep it bandaged for a bit and see how it looks in a week or so. We won’t really be able to see the extent of damage to Reki’s eye until he’s awake and we run some vision tests. And as for the breathing issue, well a combination of things must have happened to lead to this, but Reki has a punctured lung. He has several broken ribs on his right side, and one of them moved in just the right way to stab through his lung. It wasn’t bad enough to require surgery to reset the ribs though, and the lung will heal on its own as long as we keep supplying Reki with oxygen. Any questions?”

Langa faltered before responding, Cherry and Joe’s conversation flashing through his head again. Reki had probably suffered the broken ribs when hitting the railing or when making impact with the ground, but Langa was sure that Cherry was right and that _he_ had made them puncture Reki’s lungs when he had moved him onto his lap. But he couldn’t dwell on it when the doctor was expecting him to say something. 

“Is he just sleeping… or can he not actually wake up?”

The doctor frowned before standing up and walking a few paces away from the bed. 

“We had to give him some anesthesia to perform the surgery on his leg and arm, but it’s been long enough that that’s worn off. So yes, he’s likely comatose. We did some scans that state as much. His chart informed me he also was comatose for several days this past week, until just yesterday? What has this kid been up to?!”

“It’s my fault,” Langa whispered as he pressed his head into his hands. He didn’t elaborate, and the doctor shot him a strange glance.

“Listen kid, don’t worry. I don’t expect something like this to stop this boy, if he’s as reckless as he sounds. He’ll be his old self faster than you think.”

She placed her hand lightly on his shoulder again, and let it sit for a brief moment before pulling away and heading for the door. 

“I’m not usually on the night shift. I got called in for this, so I actually am heading home. The nurse who brought you in will be here all night though. If you’re planning on staying, she can answer any questions you have or direct you to the night shift doctor. He’s a nice guy. Take care, and try to get some sleep.”

The lights turned off and the door closed, bathing the room in nothing but darkness. Langa could no longer see Reki’s face, so he wrapped his fingers tightly around the boy’s cold ones and laid his head down on the mattress, pressing the top of it gently against Reki’s side as he stared blindly in the direction of Reki’s face. Reki’s breathing was very soft and still uneven despite the oxygen pumping into his system, and Langa could feel his effort to breathe in the way his chest moved up and down against the top of his head. A sound he hadn’t noticed before suddenly caught his attention: the quiet, steady beeping of a heart monitor keeping track of Reki’s heart. His fingers tightened around Reki’s as he thought back to brushing his hand over Reki’s chest in the car, teaching himself to breathe to the rhythm of his heart. Langa found himself doing it again, matching his breathing to the lifeless, mechanical beeping of a machine that measured the life of the boy in front of him, and he was soon asleep. 

***

Bright light streamed through the window that had let in only blackness before, shooting right into Langa’s eyes as they cracked open early the next morning. He groaned as he sat up, a painful ache racing up and down his back from sleeping sitting up in a chair. 

“Good morning, Reki,” he said as he stood and leaned over, gently brushing away a lock of hair that had fallen over Reki’s unbandaged eye. He was still deeply submerged in unconsciousness, his breathing struggling the same way it had been the night before. Langa sat back in his chair and stared at his face. “I can’t believe this is happening again. That I let this happen again.”

His hands found their way to his pockets, and Langa remembered Reki’s possessions that he had stuffed in them.

“The nurse gave these to me,” he said as he began pulling them out and placing them on the table near Reki’s bed. “I hope you don’t mind, I kinda snooped on your phone and used it to call your mom…”

He stared somberly at Reki as he set the phone down on the table, hoping for a response but knowing he wouldn’t get one. Then Reki’s mother’s request to keep her updated flashed through his mind again.

“Sorry, Reki, I’m gonna snoop again,” he said with a squeeze to Reki’s hand. He picked up the phone as he pulled his own out of his pocket, then copied Reki’s mother’s number into his own phone. “I’m glad you don’t have a password. I can actually follow your mom’s orders.”

He chuckled, but it quickly died as Reki’s own laughter didn’t echo his own. He typed out an introductory text message to Reki’s mom, then noticed the time and stood.

“I’m sorry, Reki. I have to go. If you think your mom’s pushy, try mine. She’d probably be furious if I missed school.” 

Langa leaned over and carefully brushed his forehead against the top of Reki’s head, pressing his warm hand against Reki’s cold cheek, then pulled the blanket higher up on his chest before stepping back. He stood at the doorway and watched Reki’s chest rise and fall for as long as he could bear before turning to head home and prepare for school. 

His mother was cooking breakfast as he quietly slipped inside, but she caught sight of him as he tiptoed past the kitchen.

“Langa! Have you been out all night?! I thought you were still asleep in bed!”

“Mom, I…” Langa turned to look at her, and she froze in the middle of rolling a _tamagoyaki_. She turned off the stove and abandoned the pan, letting the omelette begin to burn as she quickly came over to her son.

“Honey, what’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something, you’re so pale!”

She pressed her hand against Langa’s cheek, and he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He stepped forward and pressed against her, then lost control of his footing and started falling to the ground.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” she said she sunk down with him and let him cry into her shoulder, rubbing at the top of his head slowly. “It’s your friend Reki, isn’t it? But he woke up yesterday, right? I saw him out on the porch…”

“Mmm,” Langa nodded into his mother’s shoulder, unable to muster up more of an explanation than that. 

“I’m sure he’ll be okay, honey.” Langa’s mother pulled back and held him up by his shoulders, then began wiping at the tears trailing down his face. “Do you want to stay home today? You don’t look like you got much sleep last night.”

“No,” Langa finally spoke, composed enough from his mother’s support. “I need the distraction. Reki’s in a coma again, and I just… I don’t know what to do, so I need the distraction.”

Langa felt a stab of pain in his gut as his mother’s mouth dropped open slightly at the news, but she didn’t ask for an explanation. She just helped him get back on his feet and wiped away the rest of his tears.

“Alright,” she smiled. “You go and get ready, and breakfast will be waiting out here when you’re done.”

She returned to the kitchen area, but Langa could feel her eyes on him as he walked into his bedroom. This was one of few times he had really been vulnerable with his mother since moving to Okinawa from Canada, and it was definitely the most intense emotional interaction they had had. But he couldn’t help it, he was losing it. 

He raced through a bath and pulled on his uniform in a hurry, then ran through the rest of his routine and a silent breakfast with his mom before racing off to school. The whole way there, he brushed his fingers across his hand, which she had held throughout the duration of their breakfast together without saying a word. 

Though he had claimed school would be a distraction, Langa didn’t hear one word that any of his teachers said. He sat at his desk and stared at Reki’s empty one, then up to the window and the world outside. 

_I’ve never seen this view before,_ he thought in the middle of English class, a class that was always hard for him to sit through as English was his native language anyway. But today it was a hundred times worse. _Reki’s head is usually here, blocking my view with his goofy mop of hair. But now I can see everything outside the window. It looks cold. There are so many clouds in the sky. I thought it was always sunny and warm in Okinawa…_

Reki’s first stay in the hospital had only been a few days long, and although Langa had been anxious, he had known it would end eventually. He hadn’t been so deathly afraid, more just nervous to see Reki well again. He had been able to pay attention in class despite checking the clock so often. He hadn’t noticed the view without Reki there. Now, with Reki fighting so hard to breathe, uncertainty followed Langa like a shadow. The window was like a mirror reflecting back every insecurity, making Langa’s fear an inescapable physical quality, plain as day for him and everybody else to see. 

The first day, rumors had spread quickly after Reki’s mother had called the school to inform them he would be out even longer, and many of their classmates came over to offer Langa words of encouragement. Half of the time, he just half-smiled back, and the other half he was staring out the window and didn’t even hear them. As the rest of the week progressed, boys began to keep their distance during lunch and passing periods, and girls began to gather in clusters to talk about him. Langa was the first to leave when the bell rang, never having unpacked his book bag in the first place, and the hospital was his first and only destination before heading home to sleep at night. 

Each day, Reki’s unconscious form would be lying in the exact same way as the last time Langa had seen him, the only difference being that his face looked more and more tired. Just like before, Langa would spread out his homework and work at Reki’s bedside, but Shadow and Miya didn’t join him this time. He hadn’t heard a word from either of them, or Joe or Cherry. He supposed it had been as traumatizing for all of them as it had been for him. Miya had definitely shown that with the way his body had been shaking right after Reki’s fall. 

Langa spent his first Sunday at the hospital all day, working on homework at first and then talking with the nurses whenever they came in and out, asking questions first about Reki and then about what working at the hospital was like, anything to keep his mind from dwelling on the negative. Reki’s mother couldn’t often come to the hospital because Reki’s younger sisters were still so young and needed supervision, but that day was when they properly ran into each other for the first time. The whole Kyan family came, and Langa chatted with Reki’s mother and the second oldest Kyan child while the twins napped on either side of Reki in bed. Their conversation was forced, Reki’s mother grappling with feelings towards Langa that she couldn’t really express, but things relaxed quickly as he began telling her the story of how Reki had taught him to skateboard and encouraged him not to give up. 

Another week passed. This time, Langa was surprised to find Reki’s sister already in the room each day when he arrived after school. She had taken on his habit of doing her homework at her brother’s bedside, and would smile at him without saying anything as he entered the room. They would work in silence each day until the siblings’ mother would call her home for dinner. Langa always wanted to stay longer, but each day, he volunteered to walk her home. They didn’t talk much on the way back to the Kyan household, either, but she turned to him one day out of the blue and said thank you. No explanation for why, just thank you. Langa spent his lonely walk home after that wondering if he would see her at the hospital again.

***

“Hello, Langa-kun!” A cheery voice rang out as Langa stepped through the doors of the hospital late in the morning of his second Sunday visiting Reki. The nurse who had taken him back to see Reki on the night of the accident stepped out from behind the check-in desk. “Good to see you again!”

“Hi, Sayomi-san,” Langa replied with a small smile. “They switched you to the day shift again? Your sleeping schedule must be pretty messed up.”

“Oh, I get by.” Sayomi beamed as he approached her. “I heard you’ve started helping out around here. Would you like to do something for me?”

“If I can be of some use,” Langa replied sheepishly. Yesterday he had spent a few hours after school following nurses around, asking what he could do to help Reki. He had gotten ahead on his homework and needed another distraction. 

“Follow me,” Sayomi smiled again. She made a few stops before arriving at Reki’s room, then ushered Langa inside. As she set down a bowl on the table next to Reki’s bed, where he was still soundly asleep, she glanced at her watch and asked, “Reki’s family isn’t coming today?”

“No, I stopped by to come over with them and the twins both had a cold. Reki’s mom is taking care of them, and Reki’s other sister is taking care of the household duties, like dinner. I offered to stay and help, but they wanted me to come and make sure Reki wasn’t alone today.” Langa sat down on the other side of the bed and went to squeeze Reki’s hand, then realized it was bound in a cast and instead brushed at his cheek. “What did you need me to do?”

“I need to switch out Reki’s IV fluids and also finish up giving him a sponge bath that another nurse didn’t manage to complete earlier. She was called away to another patient for an emergency.”

“You want me to help _bathe_ him?” Langa’s face blushed a bright red.

“Relax, Langa-kun! She just didn’t get to his face and neck. Can you handle that for me? I’m gonna take the oxygen tubes off just to make it easier for you, so don’t rush, but just be aware of that okay? He’ll be fine without them for a little while. I’ll be right back with the new IV bag! Oh, and please be careful not to get his bandages wet!” 

Sayomi carefully slipped a towel under Reki’s head and removed the cannula from his nose, then left Langa stunned into silence as she retreated from the room. He quickly stood and went around the bed to where she had left the bowl. He peered inside and saw a small circular sponge floating in soapy water. Langa rolled up his sleeves and picked up the sponge, surprised at the relaxing lavender scent that flowed out from the lukewarm soap.

“I thought it would be fun to go to an _onsen_ together,” Langa joked as he slowly leaned over Reki and began wiping at his cheek. “I’ve never been to one here before. This is completely different…”

He felt scared to touch Reki, unsure that he was capable of moving him with enough care now that Reki was breathing on his own, so he sat down on the edge of the bed to steady himself. He carefully pushed Reki’s face to one side, then the other, as he wiped the warm sponge over his skin, going back to the bowl occasionally to soak up and wring out water. He worked silently, keeping his ears focused acutely on the pattern of Reki’s breathing. It had calmed down in the almost-two weeks since the second injury, but wasn’t completely back to normal yet, hence Langa’s anxiety the longer Reki breathed without the additional oxygen. 

Reki didn’t make a single movement in reaction to Langa’s touch, his face remaining completely serene, his lips parted slightly and his breath passing through them softly, Though his right eye was still bandaged, his left eye was closed lightly, as if he had only dozed off, not been asleep for over twelve days. 

Langa finished and pulled back, almost getting caught up in just watching Reki before realizing the importance of time. He scrambled to stand up, then lifted Reki’s head carefully to slip the towel out from underneath it. He cautiously dabbed at Reki’s skin with the towel to dry it, letting the fingers of his free hand rest in the soft curls of Reki’s hair. He slowly moved them through Reki’s hair in an attempt to comfort Reki that he probably didn’t even feel, then pulled back and folded the towel, laying it down next to the bowl on the table. He glanced anxiously at the door, watching for Sayomi, but she still hadn’t returned, so he reached for the oxygen tubes himself.

“Okay, Reki, I’m not a nurse or anything, but this looks simple enough…” Langa said shakily as he held the tubes between his fingers. His hands, too, were shaky as he leaned forward and pressed the tubes into Reki’s nose, then wound them around the back of his ears to secure them and tucked his hair out of the way. He sighed deeply. “There, I think I did it.”

Langa pressed closer to Reki and ran his finger as lightly as he could manage across the edge of his bandages, skipping over his bandaged eye entirely for fear of hurting him, and checked to make sure he hadn’t gotten any water on any of them. He let his hand rest on Reki’s cheek, just below his injured eye and laying lightly over the oxygen tube that ran across his cheek, and felt coldness already begin to creep back into Reki’s skin. 

The pattern of Reki’s breathing changed suddenly as Langa watched him, a large, almost-gasping breath escaping from his lips. Langa felt an anxious tugging begin at his heart, a fear seeping into his body that he had somehow put the cannula on incorrectly and Reki was now running out of air. He leaned even closer to Reki, his free hand winding its way down to Reki’s chest, where Langa searched for his heart. It was beating fast, the heart monitor only a background noise as sound seemed to distance itself from Langa. 

But it soon settled, as did Reki’s breathing, and Langa exhaled painfully. His hand never leaving Reki’s heart, he reached over to the bowl and scooped up the sponge again. He pressed it over the apple of Reki’s cheek, willing it to generate some kind of lasting warmth in his body. He stared at the oxygen tube just beneath it, unsure if he should try readjusting it, but a shadow of movement caught his attention. 

Shadows of Reki’s eyelashes danced across his nose, and Langa looked up to see Reki’s left eye slowly opening. His brilliant amber iris seemed dazed and far away at first, his pupil dilated, but clarity began to set in as his eye widened and his pupil adjusted to the light in the room. 

“Reki…” Langa breathed softly, letting go of the sponge as his head slumped to the pillow next to Reki. His arms trembled, but he brought one up to wrap around Reki’s head as he pressed closer to him, burying his head in the pillow as he felt hot tears begin to escape.

Reki turned his head weakly to look in Langa’s direction, unable to see his face under the locks of blue hair that covered it.

“What happened this time?” Reki said, his voice barely a whisper. At his joking tone, Langa just moved closer and pressed his forehead against the side of Reki’s head, pushing against him as he laughed between his tears. 

“Too much,” he breathed. “Too much…”

There was silence in the room as Langa tried to stifle his tears, as he listened to Reki breathing with concentration now. He felt movement and opened his eyes in a flash of anxiety, but Reki had only taken a deep breath and pressed his head closer to Langa’s. 

“Langa-kun, how’d it go? I’m sure you--” the voice of Sayomi floated into the room as she walked in, then stopped abruptly as she saw Langa laying next to Reki on the bed. “Oh no!” she breathed, beginning to scramble over to the bed but pausing as Langa released Reki and sat up.

“He’s awake,” Langa smiled brightly and scooted off the bed, moving shakily onto the chair. Reki slowly shifted to look at the nurse as confirmation, but as he began lifting his head up, Langa reached out to squeeze his hand and shot him a “lay back down _now_ ” look. 

“Oh, Langa-kun, you almost gave me a heart-attack,” Sayomi said, shaking her head as she came and stood next to Langa. “Hello, Reki-kun. I’m Sayomi, one of the nurses who have been taking care of you. You’ve got some pretty serious injuries, specifically involving your lungs, so please don’t move around. We’ll get you whatever you need. Speaking of which…”

She looked down at Reki’s hand, still clasped between Langa’s fingers, then shot Langa a mischievous glance. 

“Langa-kyuuun, there’s another thing you can help me with besides bathing Reki-kun,” she said, glancing over with a smile to see Reki’s cheeks burning red, before turning back to see Langa’s cheeks were just the same shade. 

“It was just your face!” Langa screeched in defence as Reki struggled to raise his head to stare at him. Langa raced to his feet and grabbed Reki by the shoulders, pressing gently until Reki lowered his head again. He turned back to Sayomi, gritting his teeth. In the most polite tone he could manage, he asked, “What can I do for you, Sayomi-san?”

“Sit back down, first of all,” she said as she slipped between Langa’s chair and the head of the bed. She took the almost empty IV bag off of its hook and replaced it with the one she had gone to retrieve. “I need you to hold Reki-kun’s hand so that it’s _flat_ on the bedside. I need to replace some of the tape holding his IV in, and the stuff we use is really finicky sometimes.”

Reki watched in silence, recovering his breathing from the effort of moving, as the nurse and Langa both leaned over his arm. Before replacing the tape, Sayomi carefully removed the tubing that was feeding into the IV port.

“It’s best to change the tube every few days,” she explained to Langa as he held Reki’s hand within both of his. 

She continued working, ripping off some of the old tape and making Reki flinch, before replacing it with new tape, feeding a new tube into the IV port, and connecting the tube to the new bag of fluids now hanging above his head. 

“You’re all set, now, Reki-kun!” She smiled and backed away from the bed a few paces, scooping up the towel, the bowl of water, and the sponge that had fallen to the floor as she went. “Langa-kun, show him that little button on the side of the bed right there. Just press that if you need anything when we’re not in the room, okay?”

“Mmm,” Reki responded briefly, his hoarse voice obviously a bit painful.

“Okay, I’ll leave you two alone and give your family a call. They’ll be so happy to hear you’re awake!” Sayomi smiled widely and shrugged her shoulders up in a makeshift gesture of excitement, then slipped out of the room and shut the door behind her. 

Langa turned back to look at Reki, and leaned back in surprise as Reki’s hand slipped out of his fingers. Reki reached up to his face and lightly spread his fingers across his bandaged forehead, moving down and over his eye.

“Did I lose my eye?”

“No, ah…” Langa’s voice caught in his throat as he watched Reki stare up at the ceiling, his fingers resting lightly atop the bandages. “Maybe I shouldn’t be the one to explain it to you, but the doctor said the only way to know is once they take the bandages off. It’s still, um… there, but your vision might not be 100%. They’ll have to do tests.”

Langa watched as Reki’s expression didn’t change, somewhat unreadable as he kept his vision locked on the ceiling. Finally, he let his hand flop down onto the bed again, and Langa stopped himself from reaching out to grasp it again. 

“At least I’m alive,” Reki said softly, and he turned his head slowly to look at Langa as he let the suggestion of a smile begin to form. 

Langa smiled back weakly before diverting his gaze, scanning the bedside table for a distraction.

“Here,” he said, standing to scoop up a cup of water that Sayomi had left. “You’re probably thirsty.”

Reki nodded and made no complaints as Langa brought the cup to his lips, insisting that he drink through the straw Sayomi had placed in the cup. Langa lifted up his head slightly as Reki drank, gulping down the water like a man who had been lost in the desert. 

“Better?” Langa asked as he set Reki’s head down, the cup almost empty.

“Mmm,” Reki murmured, a hint of hoarseness still present in his voice. 

Langa leaned back in the chair and put the cup back on the table, then turned to look at Reki again. There was no point in delaying the conversation, and he had run out of distractions anyway.

“What do you remember?” Langa asked the question, fighting against bursting into tears again.

“Not much, after we got to the S course. Fixing your board, getting pulled onto it by ADAM…” Langa was staring at Reki’s hand, and as he spoke the skater’s name, it began to tremble. Langa looked back up at Reki’s face, and his unbandaged eye was closed again. “After that, everything kinda just moved in a blur, we were going so fast. All I could hear was this whooshing, so loud and kinda painful. ADAM said some things to me, but I don’t remember any of it, at least, not right now. I think I remember making it to the entrance of the factory, but everything was spinning so bad I couldn’t tell my head from my foot…”

Reki stopped talking, his breathing becoming more labored and his chest heaving slightly as he recovered from the effort of speaking. Langa leaned forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“You should sleep a little more. I know you just woke up after, like, two weeks, but you need sleep to recover.”

“Two weeks?!” Reki gasped slightly.

“It was scary, Reki. Much worse than before. Anyway,” Langa stood up and pulled away from Reki’s shoulder, and Reki’s eye popped open again. “I’m going to go home so you can sleep. I’ll come back tomorrow after school.” Langa began to move towards the door.

“Please stay,” Reki said, louder than he had managed to speak since waking up. “I promise I’ll sleep, so stay until I’m out. Two weeks might have passed for you, but I’m… I’m still caught up in all of that anxiety and... it’s nice not to be alone.”

Langa turned around, and Reki was staring at him hard, the side of his face pressed to the pillow. Langa smiled, and fell back into the chair next to Reki.

“Of course,” he said softly, and Reki smiled. 

Reki turned to face the ceiling again and pulled his blanket over his arms. As he settled in to try to sleep, Langa turned to look at the open window. Much time had already passed since he had arrived at the hospital earlier that day, even though it had felt like the blink of an eye, and the golden rays of the setting sun were piercing through the open curtains to wash the room in an amber glow just like Reki’s eyes. He turned back, and Reki’s breathing had already slowed and deepened.

“I’m happy you’re back,” he whispered. “See you tomorrow, Reki.”


	4. Downhearted

When Langa entered Reki’s hospital room after school the next day, he was surprised to find Reki’s head propped up by a second pillow. He was still basically lying down, but he was now able to meet Langa’s eyes as he entered.

“Hey,” Reki said sluggishly, almost inaudibly from his bed across the room as Langa lingered at the door, eyeing the two nurses who were chatting over Reki’s chart near the window. One of them looked up, and Langa smiled to see that it was Sayomi.

“Langa-kun!” Sayomi smiled and crossed over to meet him as he inched a few paces into the room. She placed her hands on his shoulders and began to swivel him around towards the door. “Sorry, sweetie, but you came at a bad time! We’re just getting ready to unwrap Reki-kun’s bandages and take a look at his eye. You can hang out in the waiting room and I’ll come get you when we’re all done.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Langa said quietly, glancing back at Reki as she pushed him forward. That made him freeze, though, and Sayomi immediately smacked into his back. “Reki, stop moving around!”

Reki had managed to support his body weight on his right elbow and was slowly trying to lift his head off the pillow. His casted arm gripped at his side and he was gritting his teeth, pain likely surging through his broken ribs or his lungs. As Sayomi recovered from hitting Langa’s back, she followed his gaze and rushed over to Reki’s bedside, pinning him down gently just as Langa had done the day before. Langa followed in her wake, lingering close behind her and fidgeting nervously with one of the buttons on his shirt.

“What is it, Reki-kun? Use your words, you dang kid,” Sayomi huffed annoyedly. 

“Sorry, Sayomi-san,” Reki panted shallowly. “It’s difficult for me to speak loudly, so I didn’t think you would hear me unless I got your attention first.” He paused and let out a few long breaths, and Sayomi released her grip on his shoulders. 

“Can Langa stay?” Reki finally asked.

“I promise I won’t get in your way,” Langa added behind Sayomi’s shoulder. 

“You need to stop trying to sit up,” she hissed at Reki before turning to lock eyes with the other nurse in the room, whom Langa had only seen around the hospital wing a handful of times before. She seemed like she had a lot more experience under her belt, and Sayomi looked almost deferential to her as she glanced her way. The other nurse just smiled, so Sayomi sighed and put her hands on her hips. “Fine. Langa-kun, sit right here where you sat yesterday.”

Langa obliged as Sayomi pulled up the chair he had sat in yesterday as he had waited for Reki to fall asleep. Reki turned his head a smidge in his direction and smiled widely before looking up to the ceiling again. He muttered something lightly.

“What?” Langa leaned forward, his torso hanging almost above Reki’s own. The apples of Reki’s cheeks began to burn a bright red. He stammered, only slightly louder, but loud enough for Langa alone to hear.

“Hold my hand… please…”

Langa felt his own cheeks growing hot, but he quickly took hold of Reki’s hand with no questions asked. The back of Reki’s hand, where the IV fed into a vein, was as ice cold as it had been the day before, but now his palm was hot and his fingers were trembling slightly.

“I’m not scared,” Reki murmured, continuing to look past Langa’s face to the ceiling above. “I’m just not in control right now… so this helps.”

“Mmm,” Langa responded with a small nod as he laid their intertwined hands lightly across Reki’s stomach and rested his upper body weight on his elbow at the edge of the bed. 

“Now Langa-kun,” Sayomi said as she placed a tray down on the table on the other side of Reki’s bed. The other nurse came up to stand beside her and began unpacking rolls of gauze. Sayomi patted gently at the cast on Reki’s arm. “Reki-kun told me during lunch today about how you boys like to go skateboarding. He said you just picked it up, and you’re really good, so of course as a medical professional I asked how often you wipe out. He told me a little story about what happened when you saw blood one time. I’m just warning you, you may see some now, so I want you to be ready.”

Langa looked up at Sayomi as images of Reki’s crumpled form flashed before his eyes, blood trailing all over his forehead and down his leg. Langa had soaked his bloodstained shirt in bleach the minute he had gotten home, but Reki’s pain had followed him everywhere with each day that he had remained comatose. 

“I think I’ll be okay,” Langa said quietly, turning back to look at Reki and remind himself that he was awake and able to smile at Langa again. His grip around Reki’s fingers tightened as he saw concern cross over Reki’s face. “I kept it together to get you here in the first place, right?” 

Reki nodded and let himself relax into the pillow.

“There was probably a lot of blood, then. Thank you for being so brave for me.”

Langa didn’t say anything in response as he pulled back to make room for the nurses, still holding tightly onto Reki’s hand. Sayomi leaned over and gently tilted Reki’s head to the side towards her, then leaned over him as she began to work, the other nurse handing her tools from the table as she went. Langa couldn’t see much of Reki’s face, but he could feel Reki’s fingers grip tighter and tighter around his own the longer Sayomi hovered.

“Let me know if I’m hurting you,” she said softly at one point, but Reki kept silent.

Bandages were passed from Sayomi to the other nurse as she peeled them away, dotted with dark patches of blood in some spots, and Langa fought to keep himself from growing queasy. He focused instead on Reki’s fingers, tracing the way his nails curved and rubbing over the tiny scratches that he had sustained in his battle with ADAM, mostly healed over now and just slight pink markings in the smoothness of his skin. 

Reki’s hand began to tremble again, and Langa looked up to see Sayomi dabbing at his skin with cotton swabs and small patches of gauze. He still couldn’t see much above Reki’s mouth and the oxygen tube running across his cheek, but he could see enough to know that Reki had been bleeding through his stitches. Cotton swabs came away with blood on them, and dry blood dotted his skin. 

Sayomi finally pulled back after wiping away the rest of it, and began lightly patting at his hair.

“Okay, Reki-kun, we’re all done. Great job hanging in there!” 

Reki’s grip on Langa’s hand relaxed and he heard him release a long breath as Sayomi shifted away from the bed and reached for the table. Off of it she scooped up a small mirror, then returned to her spot above Reki and held it over him.

“Do you want to try opening your eyes, Reki-kun? I have a mirror right here. I think you’re looking pretty good!” Sayomi beamed, then faltered. “I’m, uh, not trying to be creepy here.”

Langa’s heart warmed to hear a small chuckle escape from Reki’s body, but he knew the moment Reki opened his eyes by the way his body stiffened. He hardly looked at his reflection for more than a second before rustling on the pillow indicated that he had turned his head again, this time in Langa’s direction. Sayomi pulled the mirror away and stepped back, and Langa looked up to see Reki searching for him, almost pulling at his hand. The almost-tangible panic in his movement made Langa fear that something was seriously wrong.

“I’m here, Reki,” Langa whispered, leaning forward again as Reki shifted his head in his direction. 

All of the tension that Reki had released before the unbandaging had begun was present in his face once more, intensified now as he stared deeply into Langa’s eyes. Langa slowly took in his face, concentrating not to let any kind of shock manifest on his own face. Sayomi had swept Reki’s hair back so that his forehead was visible. A small scar stretched a few centimeters across Reki’s hairline, already well healed from his first skate with ADAM. Beneath that, two long, crooked gashes ran down his forehead, the one on Reki’s left side going onto the bridge of his nose and the one on the right stretching through his eyebrow and creeping onto his eyelid, just as the doctor had said. The gashes were tightly sewn with black stitching, and small clots of blood still lingered on the string. His forehead and eyelid were also dotted with dark purple bruising. 

Reki was squinting a bit with his right eye, but as he focused on Langa’s face, he let it open wider. His eye was extremely bloodshot, the redness congregating mostly on the upper half of his eye but some appearing just above his lower eyelid as well. And just as Reki’s left eye had taken some time to adjust to the light when he had first woken up from his coma yesterday, Reki’s right pupil was extremely dilated and he seemed almost in pain to be looking up towards the ceiling, from where the hospital’s fluorescent lighting was brightly shining down.

“Sayomi-san, can you turn off the light?” Langa asked, not taking his eyes away from Reki. Reki smiled, surprised that Langa could tell he was in pain, and closed his eyes again. 

“If you’re up for it,” she said after fulfilling the request, “we can test out your vision now, Reki-kun.”

With the early evening light filtering into the room from the window, everything was muted, Langa’s and the nurses’ shadows dancing around the light to block its intensity. Reki slowly opened his eyes again. His left eye immediately adjusted to the light in the room, while his right eye took longer to react. His pupil adjusted slowly and when it was done, it was still much larger than the other.

Langa looked up to see Sayomi and the other nurse exchange glances and muted whispers, then the other nurse scribbled some notes on Reki’s chart while Sayomi came over to stand next to Langa’s chair. 

“I think we’ll have an ophthalmologist come and visit you tomorrow, Reki-kun, but we’ll do a small exercise right now just to see what we can tell them to help them prepare, okay?” 

Reki nodded, his lack of shock at her idea confirmation to Langa that he had been panicking when he opened his eyes, and for a good reason. Langa bit his lip as he watched Reki struggle to focus on Sayomi’s face. 

“So here’s what we’ll do,” Sayomi continued, resting a hand on Langa’s shoulder and sending a jolt of surprise through his body. “Cover your good eye and tell me how many fingers I’m holding up here, above Langa-kun’s shoulder.”

Reki moved to cover his eye, but froze with a grunt of pain as the cast on his arm limited his movement. He was still clutching onto Langa’s hand with his good hand, however, and showed no signs of letting go, so Langa reached forward and carefully placed his free hand over Reki’s eye. His skin was cold and clammy, but he smiled warmly as a sign of thanks. He had been too quiet all this time and Langa’s worry had been steadily increasing, but Langa felt his heartbeat steady a bit at the comforting sight. 

“How many fingers?” Sayomi asked, and Reki slowly shifted his gaze over to her. 

“Um… three?”

Langa couldn’t turn around and look, but the uncertainty in Reki’s tone and the beat of silence that fell before Sayomi’s response was proof enough that Reki had been wrong. 

“Two, actually, sweetie, but very close! How about you tell me in plain terms what everything looks like out of that eye, and we’ll go from there.”

Reki sighed and turned his gaze right back to Langa. Langa felt a bit of heat rise to his cheeks as Reki stared intently at him, but he didn’t want to look away. He wanted to reach out and run his fingers over the bruises on Reki’s face, rub some sort of comfort into them to replace the pain that Reki was feeling now. But he kept his hand grasped in Reki’s own, neither boy really realizing how long they had been holding onto the other. 

“Your eyes,” Reki spoke quietly after a moment. “They always have this brilliant kind of glint to them, like so many different shades of blue all wrapped into one. I can’t really see that anymore. It’s all monotone and dull, like I’m looking at you through a dirty window. There are spots where there’s just blackness, and spots where I see wavy lines or things look blurry. It’s hard to describe.”

“Okay,” Sayomi spoke in a hushed tone. “Thanks, Langa-kun.”

He let his hand fall away from Reki’s face and sat back as Sayomi and the other nurse began to gather up their utensils from the table. Reki pushed his head into the pillow and closed his eyes, and Langa sat back, slipping out of Reki’s fingers as Reki relaxed them. 

“Don’t get too downhearted, you two,” Sayomi chided. “We’ll get this figured out tomorrow! There are great doctors on staff at this hospital. Reki-kun, do you want us to put some more bandages on so you don’t have to deal with the unbalanced vision for now?”

Reki shook his head, eyes still closed, then murmured, “I need to fix it.”

Sayomi shot Langa a quizzical glance, not sure she had heard him right with his hushed tone, but Langa just shrugged his shoulders. She let it go and took on a cheerful smile again.

“If you say so. Now, Langa-kun came here to visit and ended up playing nurse again, so we’ll leave you to yourselves to talk. Reki-kun, we’ll be back with dinner in a few hours, and the night-shift doctor will probably want to check in with you after that, but you know what to do if you need us before then or if you change your mind.”

With that, she followed the other nurse out of the room and shut the door softly behind her. Langa sat in silence for a moment, staring at Reki and unsure of what to say, but becoming more uncomfortable as each second passed. Finally, he just said the first thing that popped into his head.

“Wanna hear about what happened at school today?”

“Sure,” Reki replied, popping his eyes open and turning his head to the side to look at Langa. “Anything is better than talking about my day.”

“Even hearing about  _ school _ ?”

Reki started laughing lightly, then settled into quietness after coughing and passing a hand over his broken ribs.

“Before you ask… I’m fine…” he wheezed after he had regained his composure. “Just tell me some stories, dude, come on.”

Reki closed his eyes again as Langa began to fill the silence that he had left. He leaned over and propped his head up on his elbow, so that he was close to Reki’s face and could read it well to make sure he wasn’t boring him to death. He recounted a little bit about every class, commenting on how he learned nothing new in English but Japanese had been a transcendental experience, getting a quiet laugh out of Reki. He also described how the weather had been all day, neglecting to share how he had only been able to see it because Reki hadn’t been there. 

After what seemed like almost ten minutes of talking, Langa felt like it was time to shut up. He let silence fill up the room again as he waited for Reki to say something in response, but when he didn’t Langa thought maybe he had fallen asleep. He reached forward and brushed his fingers lightly across the stitches on Reki’s forehead, icy cold to the touch, and smoothed his hair back into place above his eyes. 

“Thanks,” Reki said suddenly, and Langa almost fell backwards. “That was annoying the hell out of me.”

“You’re awake?!”

“Yeah, we were having a conversation, why would I fall asleep?”

“You didn’t say anything at all after I finished my story…”

Reki’s eyes opened again, and he looked dazedly at Langa. “Oh, I guess I kinda checked out for a bit, like, didn’t realize how fast time was passing. Thought I had more time to respond…”

“You don’t have to respond.”

“I want to,” he whispered. “Talk like everything is normal, I mean.”

“But you can’t...”

“Hmm,” Reki mumbled back, trying to confirm Langa’s guess without words. But he opened his mouth to speak anyway. “My chest hurts a lot when I speak, because of my lungs or my ribs, or both, I don’t know. And if I talk for too long, it gets hard to breathe.”

“Can you ask for more morphine or any kind of painkillers?”

“I’m not on any.” Reki shook his head. “I asked them to take me off ‘em this morning because they make me sleepy. I want to be able to talk to you when you’re here. I was out like a light yesterday after we talked for what, five minutes? We didn’t even talk about how you must have been feeling.”

“Reki…” Langa felt tears welling up, but didn’t try to hide them. “Don’t put yourself through more pain for my sake!  _ You  _ accommodating  _ me _ is not the way this works! I’ll come whenever you want me to, we can talk whenever you want! Don’t just be okay with me visiting whenever  _ I  _ want to! I want you to get better, and that means taking care of you first.”

He gripped Reki’s hand again and couldn’t help himself from leaning over and resting his chin atop it, looking up to meet Reki’s eyes as the tears finally spilled over. Reki was probably in unimaginable pain constantly. All of the movements he had made that Langa and Sayomi had had to suppress were likely way more excruciating than Langa had thought. 

“Please, for me, go back on something, at a low dose at least,” he pleaded again softly. He passed a finger lightly over the IV port in Reki’s hand, feeding nothing into his system now to dull his pain in addition to keeping him hydrated.

“I’ll think about it,” Reki breathed as he watched Langa’s fingers move. He tried his best to present a stubborn, grumpy front, but his voice had softened. “Wanna hear about my day?”

Langa pulled back and resisted a sniffle. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“If it’ll get you to stop crying and scolding me then what else can I do?”

“Okay, tell me about it. Everything from the minute you woke up until I walked in the door.”

Reki sighed in feigned annoyance. “Okay, well, first of all, I slept all the way through the night after you left and woke up this morning at around eleven, so that was probably like a solid fifteen or sixteen hours, and I still woke up tired.” He laughed, and Langa did his best to chuckle along.

“I met my doctor a little bit after that and she’s really nice. She said she was the one who fixed me up but she works day shift normally. She introduced me to a neurologist because she said I banged up my head pretty good, and he did some tests and stuff. He said he’d do more once my eye was unbandaged, so I guess that’ll be soon.”

“What did he do today?” 

“A lot of random stuff I didn’t really get. He had me squeeze his finger, which I thought was like a failed attempt at a fart joke or something, but he was apparently serious. He said that he’s gonna do that every day until I get the results he wants, so I was kinda disappointed in myself for not meeting them on day one.” Reki laughed, but it seemed a bit off, like it was just a facade.

“Your grip seemed pretty strong to me, if that’s what he was testing,” Langa smiled reassuringly. “I thought you were gonna rip my hand off after Sayomi-san finished taking off your bandages.”

Reki’s laugh was real this time, vibrating out from his chest in a way that looked like it hurt, but was undoubtedly the true Reki. 

“I bet if that doctor came back right now, he’d be dumbfounded,” Langa continued, bouncing a bit in his seat as he got more worked up. “You want to test it now? Squeeze my finger.”

Reki’s laughter increased and tears began to well up at the corners of his eyes, but he reached for Langa’s hand anyway. He grasped Langa’s index finger with all his might and squeezed, and Langa almost yelped with the force of Reki’s pressure.

“I don’t know if that doctor was high or crazy, but he definitely didn’t know what he was talking about,” Langa murmured, rubbing his finger after Reki pulled away. 

“No, I think he did,” Reki said softly. “I just think that I feel better now, with you around.”

“Oh… good, I’m glad. What else happened? I don’t think we’re anywhere near the time I got here yet.”

“Just small stuff, after that. They gave me soup for lunch that tasted like water, and I could barely get it down. Not because of the taste, though.” He tapped at one of the tubes stretching across his cheeks. “My mom came in the afternoon and cried a lot. That was kinda it, we didn’t really talk. She just cried, then she left and I fell asleep again until the nurses woke me up, and then you showed up.”

Reki turned to face the window, but Langa could still see his face clearly. His eyes looked misty and his face tired, his cheeks appearing hollowed from the shadows quickly filling the room as the sun began to set. 

“It sucked,” he whispered, “seeing my mom like that. There was nothing I could do to reassure her. I felt guilty, but I wanted her to put on a brave face and pretend like everything would be okay. I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like when I have to face everyone else.”

“You know…” Langa started, then paused, debating whether he should tell Reki. As Reki turned back to him, his bruises and his bloodshot eye still striking a painful cut through Langa’s heart, he decided he should. “Your sister was here almost every day last week. She didn’t cry or hold your hand or complain to the nurses. She just sat with you and did her homework. She tried to be as normal as the circumstances let her. She even smiled.”

“Really? I wish I could’ve seen that,” Reki shifted his gaze up to the ceiling again, smiling widely. “She doesn’t do that around me much… So you were here that often too, huh? What did you do?” He eyed Langa quizzically without shifting to face him. 

“Mostly the same thing. I helped out the nurses where I could. Talked to your mom a bit.”

“What’d you tell her about S?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know what that would mean for you in the future, so I told her straightforwardly that I couldn’t share how it happened. And she respected that, surprisingly. You have a really cool mom, Reki. She might not like me as much as she used to, but I’ll take that over a worse alternative.”

“Oh, I don’t know if my mom would make me stop skateboarding if she found out the truth,” Reki exhaled slowly, fingering at the edge of his cast. To Langa, though, his anxious fidgeting told a different story.

“I hope she wouldn’t” was all he could manage in his response.

“What about ADAM?” Reki demanded finally, turning back to divert his full attention to Langa. “Did you skate against him?”

“Hell no!” Langa leaned forward, gripping the edge of the bed with both hands. “Not after the shit he pulled! I actually… haven’t been back to the S course at all. I haven’t even  _ skateboarded _ at all. I didn’t give myself the chance to consider it. Haven’t really talked to anyone from S, either… Anyway, I plan to ignore ADAM regardless of when I show up there again. His games and his childish attitude just aren’t worth it.”

“You’re gonna get rusty,” Reki joked, but his heart wasn’t in it. Langa could see thoughts swirling around in his battered, bruised head. He seemed to be happy, but the emotion was tangled up with something else as well, something unreadable.

“What’s up, Reki?”

“I’m glad you played it safe. ADAM is unpredictable, and I’m the proof,” Reki said with a grand sweeping gesture over his broken body. He let his hand flop back down onto his stomach. “But skating is pretty fun…”

“What are you trying to say, Reki?”

A knock at the door drew Reki’s attention, and as his eyes lit up, Langa whipped around to see who had arrived. Reki’s mother stood in the doorway with a twin in each arm, the eldest sister clinging to her side. She smiled widely and dashed in front of their mother, then hurried over to the bedside, where she took Reki’s hand and stood next to Langa. 

“We’re only going to stay for a little while,” Reki’s mother explained as she walked into the room. “You need your rest, but the girls were dying to come see you after school was over.”

Langa looked back to see tears budding at the corners of Reki’s eyes as his sister leaned into the edge of the bed, and he reached out and started rubbing at her head. She didn’t cry, she just stared at her brother silently.

“Hey,” he said simply, managing to conceal his weariness better than he had when Langa arrived, and then the twins were climbing over him as well. Reki’s mother immediately started struggling to pull them off.

“Do NOT climb on your brother! You will hurt him!”

Reki grunted in pain a few times as the girls scurried off of his chest, but he had a wide smile. He looked up as Langa suddenly stood.

“Langa?”

“I’m gonna head home, Reki. Spend some time with your sisters. I promise I’ll be back tomorrow!”

He ruffled Reki’s hair lightly and smiled, noticing that Reki’s smile had faded a little. Langa ignored it, despite a deep longing to stay. He stepped away and offered the chair to the oldest Kyan girl, then backed away from the bed. He knew that staying any longer would make things awkward between him and Reki’s mother, and he didn’t want Reki to have to see that play out. 

Langa turned and headed for the door, holding in a sigh as he heard one of the little Kyan girls say, “Nii-san, those cuts make you look super manly! But why do you have red in your eye? And the black part is really, really big!” He left before he could hear Reki’s reply. 

Outside the hospital doors, Langa picked up the skateboard that he had continued to carry with him everywhere, but had not once used since the night he was supposed to have the beef with ADAM. He stared at it for a moment, running his hands along the shoe prints that Reki had painted onto the board. 

“Skating is pretty fun…” Reki had said, leaving so much more left to say, that had gone unsaid. 

_ Skating  _ is  _ fun,  _ Langa thought as he walked a few paces away from the hospital doors.  _ And it’s something we did together. It’s something we’ll do together. I can’t fall behind when Reki is trying so hard. I need to be in top form for the day he gets back on a board, so I can help him like he helped me! _

He released the board, then kicked it into a horizontal angle and jumped on. He pounded his foot against the pavement, gaining more and more speed as he flew home. His hair whipped out behind him and the air felt cool against his skin. He felt happy. It  _ was _ fun.

Later that night, though, after his mother had already gone to bed, Langa sat on the porch of his small, still-new home, with his board strewn across his lap. He stared at the trucks, the wheels, the yeti monster spray painted across it as an homage to Langa’s home country and previous passion. There were new nicks and dents in the board that hadn’t been there before. 

This board had been part of Reki’s downfall that night, in the most painfully literal sense. Langa’s strange way of skating had been part of the reason he had crashed. ADAM wasn’t the only one to blame. That realization stung, and Langa left the board sitting on a chair before going inside and crawling into bed, seeing only Reki’s face behind his eyelids as he tried to fall asleep. Only Reki, struggling so much that day to see a world that Langa could see so vividly, as he recovered from the unspeakable things that had been done to him. Langa shivered and pulled the covers over his head.

Miles away, Reki was already deeply asleep in his hospital room, having given in to Langa’s logic and been doped up with morphine again. But the morphine wasn’t enough to render a dreamless sleep. Images flashed through his mind, first of happy possibilities, facing off against Langa in the S course, competing neck-and-neck, and having a blast. But as the night wore on and the morphine wore off, his IV bag beginning to drip dry, the pain of Reki’s injuries crept into his subconscious as well. His dreams morphed, and he and Langa had swapped boards. Langa had switched out, and he was racing someone new. He was racing ADAM, and Langa had already been taken down, lying helpless on the side of the road, Reki’s board broken in half at his feet. Reki tried to stop, to go to him and protect him, but he was swept away on Langa’s board, his wobbly form and lack of control sending him spinning again. ADAM drew closer, his mouth moved but no sound came out. The only sound Reki could hear was the constant, deafening whoosh of the wind sailing past him. 

Reki awoke with a jolt, moving up into a full sitting position and screaming as the pain registered. He tore at his chest as his body was wracked with fits of coughing and gasping, then fumbled around in the dark for the nurse’s call button. Just as he pressed it, though, his search for breath left him empty and he slipped into unconsciousness again. 


	5. Tremor

Langa raced through the next day of school intent on keeping his promise to Reki that he would be back after Reki had spent time with his family. In homeroom at the end of the day his skin was practically itching with anticipation of heading over to the hospital and continuing the conversation the boys had started the day before. Langa had spent his time last night after seeing Reki with so many conflicting feelings regarding skateboarding, especially in the context of his relationship with Reki. Before he got to hear the sweet sound of the end-of-school-bell, however, he was pulled out of his homeroom class to answer a call in the faculty. 

“Sayomi-san?”

“Hey, Langa-kun!”

“What’s going on? Why are you calling me at school? Is Reki okay?” 

“Relax, Langa-kun, nothing serious has happened. I’m just calling to tell you not to stop by this afternoon like usual. Reki-kun had a rough night last night and we’ve had to sedate him today to keep him comfortable. He’s coming out of it now, but I recommend you don’t come. He’ll probably be feeling good enough for visitors again in a few days, but I’ll call you when he’s ready.”

“But what happened?”

“Don’t worry too much about it, Langa-kun. He just sat up too far, too quickly and lost control of his breathing. He blacked out, but we bumped up his oxygen intake and he came to pretty quickly. He was in a lot of pain, so that’s why we chose to sedate him.”

Langa stared at the floor after hanging up with Sayomi, and the teachers who were working at their desks around him did their best to pretend like they hadn’t been listening.

“Is everything alright?” Langa’s homeroom teacher asked.

“Mhm,” Langa nodded, plastering on the best fake smile he could manage. “Reki’s just had a little backpedaling, is all.”

“That’s too bad. I hope he’s able to return to school soon... You’ve definitely changed, not having him around. I hope you’re still engaging with your coursework.”

“Of course, sensei. Have a good evening.” Langa bowed and quickly hurried out of the room, trying to hold back from lashing out at the teacher to explain that coursework was the  _ last  _ thing on his mind. 

It felt strange to be heading directly home from school, instead of heading over to the hospital like he had been over the last few weeks. He wanted to go to the hospital even if he couldn’t talk to Reki, but something about Sayomi’s tone had given him the impression he should stay away. He would probably get in her and the other nurses’ way. Still, he couldn’t stand just going home and sitting around. 

Langa’s mother was home when he got there, and the shock on her face conveyed all the emotions he felt.

“Welcome home, Langa! You’re not going to visit your friend today?”

“I can’t. He’s sleeping.” This tremendously abbreviated description of the situation would get Langa out of the eventuality of breaking down in front of his mother again. It still wasn’t easy to be emotionally available with her, and he would rather not have to. It would make her worry too much. 

“Oh, okay. Well, I’ll whip up something special for dinner tonight since we’ll have a little more time together,” Langa’s mother said, trying hard to conceal her excitement behind a calm expression.

“Thanks, Mom,” Langa said with a weak smile before shuffling over to his bedroom and shutting the door. 

He plopped his book bag down on the ground near his desk and began pulling books and papers out, then dove into homework to distract himself from his thoughts. He hadn’t looked at his skateboard that morning as he had left for school, but he had caught sight of it sitting in the chair on the porch on his way into the house just now, and with the news about Reki swirling around in his mind, he had almost hidden it behind the chair to get it out of sight. But a memory had stuck in the back of his mind, of watching Reki pour his energy into making the board, and he had decided to leave it where it was before going inside. 

***

Every day that week, Langa looked expectantly at the door of his classroom as the school day neared its end, waiting for a faculty member to come in and pull his teacher aside like they had the day Sayomi called. He was waiting and hoping for her to call again, but the end of the week came and there was no call. 

As the bell rang that Saturday, Langa switched on his cell phone, swept his books off his desk and into his bag, and trudged silently down to the  _ getabako _ , where he began switching out his school shoes for his purple sneakers. As he plodded out the main school doors, responding to others’ well wishes for a good Sunday off with a half-hearted wave, his phone began to buzz. 

_ I’ve been waiting to text you all day, but I knew you wouldn’t see it until now anyways! _

“Reki!” Langa shouted gleefully, garnering quizzical looks from his classmates who had seen him looking morbidly down-in-the-dumps not five seconds before.

As he began typing out a response, another message from Reki came through:  _ If you want to stop by, I’d love to see you. The nurses gave me the okay. They kicked my ass today and I need to talk to  _ someone _ who isn’t wearing scrubs. _

_ On my way!  _ Langa typed back, deleting the message he was just about to send asking if he could come see Reki. He had been overly conscious of his skateboard sitting on the porch that morning, and had chosen to ignore it, but now he was kicking himself for it. He could be halfway to the hospital if he’d had it on him. 

He picked up his pace, almost running, and got to the hospital within fifteen minutes. Sayomi was roaming the halls with another nurse, and didn’t seem surprised to see him at all even though she had never called.

“Sorry, Langa-kun!,” she yelled as he ran past her, offering her a quick wave. “I had too many things on my list, and then school was over!” Langa just shook his head not to worry about it as he rounded the corner and headed towards Reki’s room. 

“Reki!” Langa shouted as he swung open the door with all his might. 

Reki was already laughing as Langa came into the room, and he felt all his tension melt away yet again. The chair he had come to think of as his was still sitting next to Reki’s bedside, and he sat down immediately. 

“Reki, you scared me half-to-death, but you look amazing!” Langa practically cheered, grabbing at Reki’s hand and giving it a tight squeeze. 

Reki was properly sitting up in bed today, and some color had returned to his cheeks. His skin was still cold to Langa’s touch, but not nearly as freezing as it had been before. He still wore the oxygen tubes, but he seemed to be breathing fairly evenly, well enough to laugh heartily in any case. Reki locked eyes with Langa and smiled, his injured eye even seeming to adjust to light better than it had before. But Langa couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t just seeing things because of how ecstatic he was.

“I’m sure you heard they sedated me,” Reki began to explain. “I think they pumped a lot of morphine into me to keep me under… When I woke up I had one of those big oxygen masks on, too, but now I’m better so I’m back on this thing.” He tapped at the tubes stretching across his face.

“I slept a lot even after that, though,” Reki continued, “Then today things kinda just went on as normal. They were supposed to show me how to sit up without hurting myself a few days ago, but that ended up happening today instead.” He gestured proudly to his body, happy that he was able to sit up and properly look at Langa for the first time.

“Isn’t it a little soon for that, though?” Langa asked. “I mean, if anything, I feel like they would have backtracked because of how much pain you were in. I don’t know a lot of the details, but it sounded like you really hurt yourself.”

“When I was sedated I didn’t have the chance to keep moving around and hurting myself, like I was doing before when you kept having to pin me down, so I was able to recover quickly.” Reki laughed sheepishly and scratched at the back of his head. “Besides, they said they had to do it because I haven’t been able to sit up to eat and they were worried about me. They’ve been giving me soup and stuff that’s easy to digest while lying down, with all my injuries and stuff, and there’s nutrients in my IV. But they want me to eat more serious meals starting from today.”

Langa kept silent for a moment as he registered what Reki said. The hollowness that he had noticed before in Reki’s cheeks hadn’t just been a trick of the shadows or his tiredness. Reki’s shoulders and arms, too, had lost some muscle and seemed so much more frail than before. He seemed smaller than he had been, more easily trampled over. ADAM’s face flashed through Langa’s mind, and he gripped Reki’s hand. 

“What happened? Why did you sit up before they taught you how to do it safely?”

“Oh, uh…” Reki dropped his gaze to stare at Langa’s fingers intertwined with his, but didn’t pull away. “I didn’t mean to. I was dreaming, and I kinda lost sense of where I was and what was going on with me when I woke up.”

“You mean you were having a nightmare,” Langa said sternly, casting a suspicious gaze over Reki. “You jolted up while you were coming out of it, didn’t you?”

“Gee, I love having a mind-reader for a best friend,” Reki huffed, letting loose a timid smile. 

“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Langa whispered. “I mean, you look better today than the last time I saw you. We just gotta get you to eat, like, three cheeseburgers per meal from now on and you’ll be good as new.” 

Reki began to giggle, breaking into a full laugh almost instantly. Sitting up seemed to be doing wonders for his lung capacity and his pain management, as he didn’t struggle so much to breathe as the laughing continued. 

“If the kid is laughing, it looks like we’re not needed here,” a gruff voice projected from the doorway, and the surprise on Reki’s face made Langa stand up and whip around quickly.

“Shadow!” Reki yelled excitedly, his face continuing to brighten as Shadow stepped into the room and another figure trailed in after him. “Miya, too!”

“Cherry and Joe are right behind us,” Miya said with a wide smile. “Joe was just closing up shop for the day.” 

“What are you guys doing here?” Langa left the bedside to approach the two standing in the middle of the room. “After not visiting, and no word at all?”

“Langa--” Reki tried to call his friend back to the bedside, but a commotion by the door drowned out his still-quiet voice.

“We have arrived!” Joe called as he strutted into the room, Cherry in tow. They both froze as they caught sight of Langa’s expression. “What’s the problem here?”

“The problem?” Langa repeated with acid in his tone. “Reki was in a coma for two weeks, and just spent time sedated because of how bad the pain was, and not one of you showed up to wish him well. You call that being his friend?”

“Langa…” Reki called again from the bed, grunting in pain as he leaned forward. 

“You’re getting him all riled up, Langa,” Cherry said quietly over Joe’s shoulder. Langa whipped around to catch sight of Reki reaching for him, one hand hovering over his chest, and he returned to the bedside quietly. 

“Thanks for all your texts, guys,” Reki said quietly as he leaned back stiffly. “I read them all this morning. I haven’t really been able to look at my phone until today, so sorry I didn’t reply.”

Langa felt his face pale. It was  _ his  _ fault. He had been so caught up in being by Reki’s side every day that he hadn’t bothered to reach out to the others. He had just expected to see them at the hospital, like they magically would know when it was safe for everybody to get together and not attract attention. He had expected them to reach out to  _ him _ , like he was officially “Reki’s keeper.” It had never occurred to him that they had reached out to Reki himself. Still, they should have moved on to Langa after not hearing from Reki. Had they not known that he had been comatose?

“Don’t apologize, Reki,” Shadow said as he came closer to the bed, still keeping his distance from Langa. “We’re all to blame. Texting isn’t enough when your friend is hurting. If we didn’t come from such different walks of life outside of S, we wouldn’t have been so afraid to just show up here. We should have forgotten about that and just done it.”

“So you just moved on with your lives then?” Langa growled, staring at the floor. 

“Alright, that’s it,” Joe sneered, and hoisted Langa to his feet by the back of his shirt. “We need to talk out in the hallway.” He dragged Langa backwards, and Cherry followed while Shadow and Miya surrounded Reki’s bed and began talking with him.

“What?” Langa hissed once they were outside, out of Reki’s earshot. 

“I know you just moved to Japan, so you don’t really get it with cultural barriers and all,” Joe began, crossing his arms. “But a guy’s career is pretty important to him in this country. People take a lot of pride in what they do, and there aren’t many chances for mistakes to be forgiven. So if we all hang out outside of S, and just the slightest little detail allows someone to trail us back to it and find out we’re engaging in illegal activities, that could spell the end for us. 

“Now, it’s not such a big deal for Shadow, because he works at a flower shop with a pretty understanding boss, and Miya’s career revolves around skating as it is, so they were able to hang with you the first time Reki was hospitalized. But if you throw Cherry and I into the mix, things get complicated. Cherry’s got a lot of fans at S, but he’s got a ton at his day job, too. And I run a restaurant, which means serving a lot of different people. People like to talk. We had to look out for ourselves, and we didn’t want you and Reki getting caught up in drama like that, either, because your lives have barely even begun.” 

“But isn’t Reki more important than all that?” Langa demanded, his attitude cooling off as he tried to put himself in Joe’s shoes.

“He is,” Cherry interjected. “And that’s the other reason why we all stayed away this time, Shadow and Miya included. You were losing your head over Reki, and we, me especially, made it worse. You took the things I said to heart, you took the blame upon yourself. I can see that you’re still doing that. And we would have made it worse by being around.”

“How do you know that?” Langa could feel defensive walls building as memories of Cherry’s comments resurfaced. An aggressive edge returned to his voice. “Reki wasn’t the only one who needed you guys. I did, too. I was all alone, trying to swallow guilt and pray that he would be okay at the same time. You wouldn’t have made it worse, you would’ve made it better. Leaving me alone like that, to watch over Reki while he was in pain, just made me feel like I had to surrender to this sense that I had destroyed Reki’s life or something.”

Langa’s late night thoughts from earlier that week were resurfacing in his brain, and he visualized his skateboard. It had become symbolic of two sides simultaneously. The fun that Reki had tried to remind him of, and the fear and pain that he had caused for Reki. They were both tugging at his heart and mind, and the anger he had built up for Cherry, Joe, Shadow, and Miya was sending him careening towards the negative side. 

“I thought you wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself as long as I was around,” Cherry sighed, looking through the small glass window into Reki’s hospital room. “I thought I would be a constant sign, a reminder, of what role you played in hurting Reki, because seeing me would remind you of what I said. I wanted to wait until Reki was doing better to talk to you about it, to just let you focus on one thing at a time. I didn’t want to make things harder on you or make your self-hatred any worse. I could already see it in your eyes when I looked back at you that night, when we were moving Reki to the car, and seeing that in itself was almost too much to bear. Now I see that running away from that fear wasn’t the way to handle things. You’re stronger than that, and you care too much about Reki to let guilt over a simple mistake drag you down. I’m truly sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Joe said, doing his best to meet Langa’s eyes. “Even if you don’t forgive us, forgive Miya and Shadow. They kept their distance because we told them to.”

“What about texting Reki? Why did you guys continue to do that even after he didn’t reply? Why didn’t you text me to find out how he was doing, even if you didn’t want to see me?”

“We wanted him to know we were thinking about him, even if we couldn’t come and see him,” Joe explained, tenseness still lining his voice. “We wanted him to see all of our thoughts and feelings poured out for him when he woke up, even if they weren’t expressed in person.”

“And I thought texting you would be just as bad for you as anything else. But we knew. Miya’s been checking in once a day with the nurse here and has kept us updated,” Cherry added. “There were a few times when he expressed wanting to come in person, especially after the days started building up with no news, but our decision didn’t change. He had also asked the nurse to keep an eye on you, and her descriptions of you always getting involved in helping out made it seem like you were trying to atone or something. We thought your feelings were still wearing you down, and we wanted to give you space to heal.” 

A knock at the small glass pane made Cherry jump, and Miya cracked open the door.

“Cherry, Joe, are you guys gonna come in and talk to Reki at all? That’s what you came here to do, after all…”

“Right,” Joe nodded, but he made no move to follow as Miya went back inside. He just looked at Langa. “What can we do to make up for our mistakes?”

“Nothing,” Langa shook his head and smiled. “I’m just glad we’re on the same page now. Go on and talk to Reki. I forgive you guys, but I think you should apologize to him, even if he was fine with just the texts.”

Cherry and Joe both nodded before opening up the door and slipping into Reki’s room. Langa lingered in the hallway, listening to their conversation as he pressed up against the cool wall. Sayomi passed by with a chart and some supplies for another patient, offering a small wave, and Langa felt a pang of sadness as he waved back. She had been so kind and reassuring to him, but this whole time she and the other hospital staff had watched over him like they were trying to diffuse a ticking time bomb? She had seemed too genuine for that…

“Langa-kun? Is everything okay?”

Langa obviously had let his doubts show too visibly on his face, as Sayomi was now circling back towards him. She shifted items around in her arms and placed a light hand on his shoulder. 

“Sayomi-san, was I a nuisance to have around when Reki was in a coma?”

“No, Langa-kun!” Sayomi began rubbing gently at his shoulder, trying to comfort him. “It was actually so sweet to see how much you care about him. Most visitors just sit with patients for a few minutes, but you, sweetie, you’re miles above the rest. You did your best to be useful and did what only you could do to bring Reki-kun back to you and to his family. And you took the time to get to know me and the other staff, which is something that visitors  _ never  _ do. I shouldn’t be bad mouthing, so don’t share this with anyone, but sometimes I feel like I’m invisible. Not with you. Visitors like you remind me why I do the things I do, Langa-kun.

“Now,” she pulled away. “I’ve gotta run off and attend to another patient, so I’ll see you around. I know I don’t have to tell you this, but please pass it along to Reki-kun’s other visitors that visiting hours are almost over!” She offered a smile wider than Langa had seen on her before, even when he encountered her bright-eyed and cheery at the beginning of a shift. Then she scurried off, and Langa was alone in the hallway again. 

***

Reki had informed the group as they were getting ready to head out that Sunday was to be his first day of more intense physical therapy, and he wouldn’t be allowed any visitors because he would probably be exhausted afterwards. So here Langa was, after a late morning sleeping in, enjoying lunch with his mother for the first time in ages. 

“It’s exciting news, huh, that your friend’s doing so well?” Langa’s mother spoke warmly as she chewed on her food. “What are they doing with him today?”

“He didn’t really know,” Langa replied, pushing food around on his plate. He was nervous, apprehensive that Reki might push himself too far in therapy and end up backtracking again. “I think they’re going to work on breathing exercises, since that’s what he’s having the most trouble with right now. He said they don’t want him on oxygen much longer because there’s actually side effects, like headache and tiredness, and it can actually make your lungs irritated and lead to coughing too. Reki’s had to deal with all of that, and he said his doctor’s not sure if the oxygen is compounding problems from his existing injuries or if the oxygen alone is causing it all. So the sooner he’s off it, the sooner they can figure that out. The headache especially is important since he has a head injury.”

“It sounds like Reki-kun’s doctors know what they’re doing.” Langa’s mother smiled and squeezed his hand, helping some of his nerves to dissipate. “You said that he was supposed to meet with an optometrist, but that was probably delayed after his rough night, right?”

“Yeah,” Langa replied, pulling out his phone. “Reki texted me a few hours ago and told me he met him this morning. It wasn’t as bad as the doctor was expecting, so he said Reki’s eye will continue to heal on its own and he shouldn’t need surgery or tons of medication.”

“That’s great news, sweetheart! Maybe it’s too early to bring this up, but any news on a possible date for him to be discharged? It’s great having you around the house more, but your energy is different and I’m a little worried. Reki-kun is a great friend to you, I can tell. I just want things to go back to normal for the two of you…”

Langa shook his head, and his mother dropped her eyes to her plate. After a moment of silence, she stood and began collecting the dishes.

“Oops!” 

A loud crashing noise caused Langa to look up, and the two plates were in a heap of jagged pieces at his mother’s feet.

“I think I just felt a little tremor!” Langa’s mom huffed and stared down at the plates. “How disappointing. This is the second time I’ve dropped plates since moving here. We’ll run out before we’ve even lived here a year!”

“Mom, you need to be more careful…”

As Langa stood to join his mother in picking up the jagged pieces, an enormous vibrating began to shift up from beneath their feet, and mother and son both instinctually gripped the table.

“What’s happening?!” Langa yelled as the shaking began to knock things off the kitchen shelves. The family picture fell over on the table. 

“I knew I felt a tremor!” his mother shouted. “It’s an earthquake, honey! They happen way more often in Japan! Come here!”

Keeping one hand tightly stuck to the table, Langa’s mother extended the other towards Langa and gestured for him to move closer. She pulled him to the floor and the two crawled under the small table. Once she was sure Langa was securely under the table and holding tightly onto it, she raced out to where the remote had fallen off the coffee table a few feet away, then darted back before switching the tv on. They watched from under the table as news stations across the island of Okinawa reported on the situation. 

“Oh my lord,” Langa’s mother breathed after watching in horror for several minutes, then pointed to the tagline running under the reporter. “The magnitude isn’t too high, but it triggered a landslide near the epicenter. Langa, which hospital is Reki-kun at?”

The broadcast changed before Langa had the chance to see what his mother was pointing at, but he didn’t need to. Images of the hospital that had become all too familiar to Langa flashed across the screen, whole sections of the building missing, swept up in a landslide that had started in the forest behind the hospital. The broadcast showed the wing where Reki’s room was, and that it had been torn clean off of the rest of the hospital.

“No… no… This can’t be real,” Langa breathed quietly. “There’s no way. How can this be happening?” Tears began slipping rapidly down his cheeks, and his mother pressed against him and began to rub his head as the trembling subsided in their own living room. “Why do bad things keep happening to Reki?” he whispered, unable to hold himself up anymore as he fell into shock.

“I don’t know, sweetie, but maybe Reki-kun is just fine!” his mother said, pulling back and holding his face between her own trembling hands.

“I’m going!” Langa said suddenly, yanked out of the motionlessness of shock by a sensation of flaming heat beginning to spread through his veins. He pulled out of his mother’s embrace just as she tried to hold tighter around him.

“Langa, don’t go, it’s dangerous! There will be aftershocks!” 

He turned to look at her as he stood, seeing the tears dotting her cheeks as she remained under the table on her hands and knees.

“Don’t go,” she whispered again.

“Mom, I’m going. I love you.”

Langa turned and bolted for the door, then soared out and onto the porch. He grabbed his skateboard off of the chair without hesitating to think, then jumped onto it and began pumping his legs as fast as he could to pick up speed. He glided across the pavement faster than he remembered ever moving before, and arrived at the hospital without really being aware of how he had gotten there. The one thing that had been on his mind was Reki.

The parking lot of the hospital was filled with clusters of people, patients and staff alike having injuries treated. Langa saw police, firefighters, and other emergency services, as well as doctors and ambulances he didn’t recognize, clearly having come from other hospitals in the area to help, but he didn’t waste time to gawk. He bolted through the crowd, looking for any familiar face he could ask for help. But he recognized no one.

There was a perimeter set up around the entrance of the hospital, with barricades and police officers keeping people from getting too close, but Langa now knew this hospital like the back of his hand. He skipped over the entrance and went around to the side of the hospital, where he usually entered a smaller door with less foot traffic to get to Reki’s room more quickly. Now, the door and the hallway that it had led to were gone, completely destroyed in the landslide. A crumpled mess of materials was left in their stead. 

Langa kept running around the outside of the hospital, his knuckles white around his skateboard under his arm, looking for the window he was so used to looking through from the other side. The back of the hospital had taken the worst of the landslide, pockmarked by clumps of trees from the forest and missing rooms and hallways, and Langa finally stopped, huffing almost as hard as Reki did after a long laugh. The window he was sure belonged to Reki’s room was gone, a gaping hole in its place. Inside, the bottom half of a bed laid on its side and an IV pole had toppled over across it. Blood dotted the floor and seemed to trail out into the hallway through a hole where the doorframe had been, but there was too much debris blocking the way for Langa to clamber into the room and follow the trail. 

Langa panicked, then turned around to survey the rest of the route along the backside of the hospital, searching for an open access point to the interior of the building. But there was nothing, and he hung his head low. He turned back to the debris in front of him and kneeled down, pressing his hands up against a large sheet of heavy metal. He almost considered tearing away at the debris to get through when something caught his eye.

On the right edge of the sheet of metal, a large smearing of blood was dripping down into the pile of debris below. As Langa tracked the trail, he noticed that several more drops scattered the ground near his feet. It wasn’t going into the hospital room, but going out, towards the forest behind it. Langa whipped his head around and--yes, there, several more splotches headed towards the line of trees behind him.

“Reki!” Langa called, starting to run again.  _ How could he have gotten out of here, though? He can’t walk!  _ Langa just shook his head, attempting to throw logic away in order to concentrate and move faster. He called Reki’s name again several more times as he began to move into the dense woods, stepping over toppled tree trunks and crushed branches. 

As he moved, Langa noticed pieces of medical equipment, like stethoscopes, IV bags and even gurneys, strewn about in the forest and in large muddy mounds. He began calling out “Hello?!” over and over, for fear that others from the hospital might be buried under the dirt and grime or caught beneath a fallen tree trunk. No response met his call.

Finally, Langa arrived at a clearing, and nearly collapsed at what he saw. Tiny clusters of two to three people huddled about, consisting of mostly patients who were freezing in their thin hospital gowns. He approached every group and told them the way to go to head back toward the hospital, and did his best to get them on their feet again. Most were injured only slightly, and could walk. But still no sign of Reki.

“Langa-kun?” a voice reverberated over from the far side of the clearing, and Langa felt a jolt go through his heart even though the voice sounded too feminine to be Reki.

“Sayomi-san?!” 

“I’m over here!”

Langa began running again, and soon enough found two patients clustered around the nurse. At last, he had found the source of the mysterious trail of blood. Sayomi had suffered a wide gash trailing up the majority of her left leg, and she was obviously in pain despite how well she tried to hide it.

“What are you doing here, Langa-kun? You should be nowhere near the hospital today,” Sayomi chided through gritted teeth. 

“I came to make sure Reki was okay. Where is he?” Langa asked, barely containing the panic burning in his throat as he flagged over one of the only other nurses he could see, a man with a bad shoulder cut, but legs that were working just fine. “You should go get that looked at, but you know where Reki is, right?”

“I’m sorry, Langa-kun,” Sayomi said through a painful hiss as her co-worker helped her to her feet. “I was on my way to Reki-kun’s room when the earthquake started, and then the landslide hit and we all got scattered. I managed to make it back to his room and he was gone, but I saw people coming out of the forest, so I headed in here. I couldn’t make it very far though. The people you see here were all thrown from different parts of the back of the hospital, so Reki-kun could be anywhere.”

“Are you talking about the redhead with the broken leg and arm?” Sayomi’s co-worker interjected, and Langa practically lunged at him.

“You’ve seen him?!”

“No, sorry, but I also came looking for people in the forest. Before I did, I heard the police tell a doctor from our wing that the gas line near that kid’s room broke.”

“What does that mean?” Langa asked, feeling his face go white as he saw the color draining from Sayomi’s face.

“We need to find him fast,” she said shakily, adjusting her footing with her co-worker’s support. “Depending on how bad the leak is, if he was exposed, he could be experiencing side effects that will complicate his injuries, plus any additional ones he might’ve just received.” 

“You can’t do any searching in that state,” the other nurse scolded, then looked up at Langa. “I was gonna keep searching past this clearing, it looks like there’s a lot of damage that way and I could’ve sworn I heard a voice not too far off. If you’re willing, go check it out while we take these patients around to the front of the hospital.”

Langa nodded and started running again without waiting for another word from Sayomi or the other nurse, pausing despite his anxiety to help up others who were trying to get to their feet. Finally, he made it to the back edge of the clearing and took off, calling Reki’s name again as he went.

The forest continued to grow dense, and Langa was beginning to lose hope as he saw less and less broken foliage. He was moving out of the zone where the landslide had occurred, which meant he was farther than he ever had been to finding Reki. Completely out of breath, he crouched down in the midst of a clump of tall trees and wrapped his arms around his knees. As he waited for his breathing to return to normal, he stared hard at the dirt beneath his purple shoes, doing his best to ignore the small flecks of blood that dotted the tips of them. 

“Wait, what the hell?” Langa leaned forward, sinking his knees into the soft dirt and placing his hands down on the ground. He ran his fingers through the dirt. “This is soft, but it looks packed down like something pressed on it… or… was dragged over it?”

Langa’s head shot up as he followed the uncharacteristically packed dirt, which curved in strange lines before bending around the side of a tree. He crept forward on his hands and knees as more of the other side of the tree came into view, and froze as something unfamiliar in a natural landscape registered in his field of view.

“An IV port?”

Langa’s body lurched forward instinctually as he made the connection. He moved around the tree to see a hand half-buried in the dirt, the IV port sticking straight out of it and barely secured by a few pieces of soiled medical tape. There was no tubing or IV bag anywhere to be seen. Langa pushed frantically at the underbrush around him and finally, finally, there was Reki. He was lying in the dirt with his head pressed up against a root from the tree above him. A long gash tore deeply through the skin of his left leg, even worse than Sayomi’s cut had been, and he was clutching wildly at his chest with his casted arm. His eyes were just barely open despite how much he strained for air, and the oxygen tubes that had been supporting his breathing were nowhere to be found. In their stead, a small trail of blood dripped out of his nose. 

“Reki! Reki!” Langa felt panic setting in anew at the sight of him, knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do to assure Reki’s safety. Reki’s eyes flicked in his direction, and it was enough for Langa to regain composure. “Just focus on breathing okay? I’ll handle everything else!”

Langa’s vision began to blur as his eyes flooded with tears, but he ignored all of it as he moved quickly to Reki’s left side. He froze momentarily as the sound of Reki gasping in his arms in the abandoned factory returned to him, but the sound was washed out by Reki’s very real, unyielding gasping that was happening right before his eyes. Langa’s arms shook violently, but he put aside his guilt and gripped Reki’s body, then hurriedly but cautiously pulled him into his arms. 

Reki let out a curdled scream, then bit down hard on his lip as if trying to silence himself, his eyes squished shut so tightly his eyelids were turning white. Langa could tell Reki was far from done screaming, the pain likely immeasurable and flooding into his nervous system from so many parts of his body, but he was keeping it in for Langa’s sake.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Langa kept repeating into Reki’s ear as he moved. He wouldn’t let Reki’s pain be enough to freeze him in his tracks this time, but it was still emotionally painful enough for Langa that moving felt like torture. He ran, holding Reki tight to him, doing his best to press his sleeve against Reki’s gaping cut, and feeling every gasp, every lurch of his chest like an electric shock. He knew that moving any slower to abate Reki’s pain would take him closer to losing Reki forever. 

He moved through the trees in a whirlwind, hardly looking at his feet but somehow managing not to trip over branches, logs, or underbrush. When he made it to the outskirts of the forest, he was farther along the back of the hospital than he had been before, but he just kept running. And running. And running. Because Reki had gone quiet.

Langa made it to the parking lot and began searching through his tears for any kind of help, but a wildly waving hand soon caught his attention. Sayomi was sitting on the ground, her leg well-attended to and bandaged up, beside an oxygen tank. She held a mask in her hands, which were shaking badly. 

“I thought he would need this,” she said calmly despite her shaking body as Langa approached and carefully laid Reki down in front of her. Langa wiped at Reki’s nose with his shirt sleeve, and felt his heart lighten to see Sayomi smile as the bleeding stopped. She slipped the mask over Reki’s face and adjusted some controls on the tank, then began undoing the ties on Reki’s hospital gown. “Reki-kun, can you hear me? Did he say anything to you?” She glanced at Langa before beginning to press softly at Reki’s rib cage.

“No, ah… what are you doing to him?” Langa stared at the purple bruising trailing across Reki’s skin.

“I’m looking for any changes. If we don’t catch an internal injury that wasn’t there before, Reki-kun will pay for it later.” 

“Is it hurting him?” Langa asked, watching her fingers dig into his skin.

“I think he’s unconscious, Langa-kun. He’s not even flinching, and this should be hurting him a bit.” She bent over and began pressing, a look of perplexion crossing over her face. She gently poked at a particularly purple spot, and a long groan escaped from Reki’s lips. “Never mind!” Sayomi howled and jumped back.

Reki’s eyes opened just widely enough for Langa to see the amber of his irises, and he just stared at Langa as Sayomi kept pressing gently at his ribs, letting out small, almost soundless gasps as she poked at certain places. Langa wiped at his eyes and apologized to Reki.

“I know you hate seeing me cry, and I’ve been doing it in front of you a lot lately,” he whispered. Reki smiled, sending Langa into another round of tears as he tried to see it through the oxygen mask. 

Reki then turned his head and began to look at the parking lot around them, and his eyes began to take on a faraway glassiness. He seemed like he was about to lose consciousness again, only half-aware of his surroundings and even starting to lose understanding that Langa was right there beside him. His eyes were roaming constantly, but dazed, and his head slumped against the hard concrete like he had given up the last of his energy long before today. 

A sudden trembling shook the ground, what Langa quickly understood to be an aftershock, and he wrapped Reki’s head in his arms to keep him from bouncing against the ground. When it all subsided, Langa pulled away to see that Reki had given over to unconsciousness.

“Don’t worry,” Sayomi reassured Langa, eyeing him cautiously as she tied up Reki’s gown. “He’s just worn out and his brain is directing all his energy to breathing correctly. He’ll wake up again soon, just listen.”

Langa lowered his head and followed Sayomi’s orders, and the sound of Reki’s drawn-out breaths lulled him into as much a state of calmness as he could manage at the moment, meaning his anxiety was only put on hold briefly. 

“Is there something I can do to help?”

“Oh, we’re at it again!” Sayomi joked, trying to sustain Langa’s calmness as much as possible. “‘Reki-kun’s out cold, so I gotta step up!’ is what you’re thinking! Well, you know I love that, so yes. He and I are twinning here, with these huge cuts, so I need you to go and get some bandages, a clean needle, and thread for me. If they have any left, some morphine would help too. He’ll barely be able to stand the pain when he wakes up unless he’s got some in his system. If there are any doctors available, bring one. Nurses technically aren’t allowed to sew up gashes, but this is an exceptional scenario.”

She handed him a small card and pointed to a tent on the far side of the parking lot, but a look of hesitation crossing her face stopped Langa from heading over right away.

“What is it? And what is this?”

“My I.D., silly. Me giving that to you means that I  _ trust you. _ So don’t lose it. Show it to the staff at the tent and then point at me. I’ll wave. Explain that I can’t walk over there, so this’ll have to do.”

“And why do you look so concerned?”

“Oh, nothing. I’m just worried that we’ll have a hard time getting Reki-kun off the painkillers later, but that’s a problem for another time.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Langa smiled softly. “He didn’t want to be on them in the first place, remember?”

Sayomi nodded with a hint of reassurance, and Langa left her to watch over Reki. He had only gone a few paces when another small aftershock sent a ripple through the ground and made him wobbly on his feet. He glanced back to check on Reki and Sayomi, and stiffened. Sayomi had her back to him, looking over the cast on Reki’s arm, but she wasn’t blocking Reki’s face from view. His eyes were wide open, glassy, but more alert than he had seemed even when talking with Langa and the others the day before. Tears were running down the side of his face, glistening across his sweat-soaked skin and disappearing in the fiery curls of his hair. His hand was outstretched, dirt caking his fingernails and coating the IV port that still hung loosely off of him. He was panicking, pleading without words for Langa to stay. Scared that Langa would never come back again?

Langa didn’t know, but he smiled gently and lingered on Reki’s eyes for a moment longer before forcing his feet to turn and walk away. 


	6. A Knee-Jerk Reaction

The image of Reki’s hand reaching for him kept replaying in Langa’s head as he navigated through the clusters of people in the parking lot. He made it to the tent only to find a long line of medical staff waiting for supplies and checking in with doctors and police, so Langa simply joined the throng of people. Even though his nerves were eating into his skin like bug bites, there was nothing he could do when other people also needed help. 

Langa glanced back a few times as he waited, but the crowds of people were densely packed and more people were arriving on the scene as well. Reki and Sayomi were hidden among a sea of other faces, so he turned forward again. The line was slow-moving, and all Langa could think about was the gash on Reki’s leg, letting more and more of his blood spill out onto the concrete the longer Langa was away. He looked down at the sleeve of his shirt, covered in Reki’s blood from when he had carried him out of the forest, and rolled it up before tucking his arm behind his back and staring at the back of the person in front of him.

“How can I help you?” an upbeat voice called to Langa, and he jerked his head up to realize that he had zoned out, wrapped up in his thoughts, and he was now at the head of the line. 

“I-I need bandages and a needle and thread. My friend has a cut on his leg,” Langa said, scrambling to get his thoughts together. “If there’s an available doctor, that would be a big help.”

“I’m sorry, but the last one just left to help someone in critical condition. Someone should be back soon, though, and we’re expecting a team from another hospital to arrive shortly. Do you think you can wait?”

Langa felt panic boiling bubbles in his stomach, but then he remembered the card he was gripping tightly between his fingers.

“There’s a nurse with us,” he handed the card to the tent attendant and turned to face the sea of people. “She can do it, technically, since this is an emergency? She also asked for morphine. My friend needs it for lung and rib injuries he had before the landslide.”

“Why didn’t you start with that, kid?” the attendant scolded, peering down at Sayomi’s ID.

It would be impossible to spot Sayomi in this mess and point her out to the attendant, but Langa could tell by the look on her face that she was skeptical of why Langa had a nurse’s ID. He wouldn’t get anything out of her unless he followed what Sayomi had said to do and verified that he had gotten it from her willingly. Langa glanced back at the attendant, who was now eyeing him dubiously, then quickly turned back to the crowd to avoid her stare.

“There!” Langa cried, more anxious trembling flooding into his shout than he had meant to let show. As he pointed, his finger shook.

He was able to make out Sayomi’s face, near the farthest edge of the parking lot towards the back of the hospital, only because she was now standing up and bearing her weight on her injured leg. Her face was strained with pain, but she was moving both arms in a grand sweeping movement to try to get Langa’s attention.

“That’s the same nurse, alright,” the attendant said. “I’ll get you what you need. But if I get you some morphine and I see you run the other way, you will be chased down. There are people out there who would manipulate a situation like this for a fix. You don’t seem like one of ‘em, but I have to be on my toes. Wait here.”

The attendant handed Sayomi’s card back to Langa and went inside the tent. Langa could hear several other voices inside, like the attendant was going around to various supply stations and requesting what he’d asked for. 

“Alright,” the attendant came back out of the tent with a roll of bandages and a small bag full of medical-grade string and a needle. She handed them off to Langa, then pulled a bagged syringe out of her scrubs’ pocket. “This here is a single-dose injection of morphine, which is different from how your friend was probably taking it before. That was probably through an IV, but this is more like a shot, it goes into the muscle. The nurse will know, but you should too because you’re transporting it.”

The attendant passed the bag on to Langa and he offered a short nod of thanks before turning and bolting in the direction of Sayomi, who was beginning to falter and grit her teeth. As she saw him coming, she sank to the ground and her head disappeared. Langa kept his eyes fixed on the space where her head dipped back into the crowd, though, and managed to make it close enough to see her again.

“No doctor,” Langa breathed as he slowed to a stop next to her.

“That’s fine,” Sayomi said as he knelt down and passed the supplies to her. She wasted no time in rolling up the sleeve of Reki’s gown and injecting the shot into his arm. She sat back and stared at him as he slowly craned his head to look at Langa.

“Hey, I’m back,” Langa said, grasping Reki’s hand with both of his. 

Reki’s hand was shaking badly, and Langa could see it in his shoulders as well, but as Reki’s eyes focused on him and as the drug began to flood his system, he seemed to relax. His hand tightened around Langa’s and the tears stopped rolling out of his eyes. 

“Reki-kun, I’m gonna start patching up your leg now,” Sayomi said, leaning over so that she was close to his face. “We’re gonna have to turn you on your side, which might hurt your chest a little, so bear with me. You also might feel a tug here and there while I’m stitching, but I’ll do my best to be gentle.”

Reki nodded, taking in a large breath as he did so, then closed his eyes. He didn’t make a sound as Sayomi slowly lifted up his head and rotated his body to the side, but Langa could feel his shoulders start to shake again as Sayomi laid Reki’s head down across his knees. Reki kept his eyes closed as Sayomi began to work on his leg, and Langa did his best to comfort him by wiping carefully at the sweat across his forehead. 

The oxygen mask felt cold against Langa’s legs, and Reki was taking long breaths into it. Langa caught Sayomi sneaking glances at it as she worked on Reki’s leg, and by the time she had finished, her face seemed almost buried in shadow.

“What’s wrong?”

“I thought Reki-kun’s breathing would stabilize a bit faster than it is. This oxygen tank won’t last as long as I was hoping it would.” She looked up and scanned the area. “Remember the nurse who said the gas line broke? I think Reki-kun was exposed to it, which means a lot of other patients in our wing were as well. And not enough portable oxygen tanks were recovered to give more than one to each patient.”

“What do you mean? Why would everyone need one who was exposed?”

Sayomi sighed. “The main side effects of gas poisoning are weakness, nausea, breathing problems, loss of consciousness and headache. If the leak was severe enough, the people with breathing problems are going to need oxygen. Reki-kun’s also experiencing some of these issues, I think, on top of the strain of his injuries.

“Anyway, it’s too dangerous to go back into the hospital now,” Sayomi continued, wiping her bloody hands on her pants. She turned and stared hard at Langa. “You need to get Reki-kun to another hospital in a more stable area before he runs out of air in this tank. Things here won’t be cleaned up for a long time. If I don’t reduce the amount of oxygen Reki is taking in, the tank will run out in about five hours.”

“But what if I hurt him?”

“I’ll be fine, Langa.” It was the first time Reki had spoken since Langa found him in the woods, and his voice was so quiet and muffled under the oxygen mask that Langa hadn’t even processed that he was speaking until after he had finished. He opened his eyes, and Langa froze as they made eye contact, unable to come to terms with the idea of moving Reki around any more.

“You don’t have much time, Langa-kun,” Sayomi stressed, pulling herself over to sit beside him and letting her injured leg stretch out beside her. 

Langa turned to look at her, then looked up to the road leading out and away from the hospital. It was completely filled with debris from the landslide on one side, and jam-packed with emergency vehicles on the other side. There would be no getting through unless he could weave quickly amongst all the traffic.

“I’ll be right back!” Langa blurted out, then carefully lowered Reki’s head to the ground and shifted to his feet. He turned and reran the route he had taken when he first arrived at the hospital, stopping in front of Reki’s now destroyed room. He had let his skateboard slip his mind when he had seen all the destruction, and it had fallen out of his hands here. He stopped and looked around, then saw it near the pile of rubble where he had seen the trail of Sayomi’s blood.

“Here!” Langa called as he raced back with the board in hand. “We can move quickly on this, but I don’t know…”

“Don’t know what?” Sayomi asked cautiously, reaching up with extra gauze to wipe at the sweat that had formed on Langa’s brow in all his hustling.

“I’ve never carried someone while skateboarding before. And this is not the best scenario to test it out…”

He kneeled down and placed the board on the ground between him and Reki, letting his hand rest atop it as he racked his brain for a reasonable solution. All of a sudden, there was heat radiating across his skin, and he looked up to see Reki’s hand lying across his. He seemed about to say something, but he coughed and fell silent, gripping Langa’s fingers tightly instead.

“I know you’re apprehensive,” Sayomi said, “but you’re right. I saw you leaving the hospital once, you know what you’re doing. You’ll move more quickly on a board, and this is the only thing you can do if you want to help Reki-kun. Here, this is my cell phone number. We’re not supposed to give personal info out to patients, but I care about you boys too much. Call me if you run into any trouble, and let me know what hospital you end up at.” She took a pen from the pocket of her scrubs and scribbled her number on a small piece of bandage, then tucked it into the breast-pocket of Langa’s shirt.

Langa looked back and forth from her to Reki, then breathed in deeply.

“You ready, Reki?”

“Mmm.”

“Okay, here goes.”

He stood and went to Reki’s other side, and he and Sayomi each grabbed one of his hands and carefully pulled him into a sitting position, Langa following Sayomi’s orders to a tee. Their careful precision wasn’t enough, however, and Reki immediately began to fall forward, his eyes rolling back as he lost consciousness. 

“Grab him!” Sayomi shouted, and Langa lunged forward to stop Reki’s movement. He scooped Reki’s face into his hands and sat chest to chest with him, doing his best to keep his legs from dropping any weight on Reki’s. “I’ll pull him back, so you turn around and I’ll lay him against your back. Grab his legs, then stand, and I’ll hand you the oxygen tank to use as a seat for him. It’ll be a bit heavy. Be  _ careful  _ with it.”

Langa followed her orders and the two managed to awkwardly hoist Reki onto Langa’s back and get him into a standing position.

“Reki?” Langa turned and spoke into his ear, Reki’s head resting on his shoulder. He didn’t respond, but his breathing was the same as it had been before. Langa turned to stare at Sayomi.

“I think he’s okay,” she breathed uneasily. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to do anything more for him anyways, so you should get going. Be careful.”

“I will. Thank you for everything, Sayomi-san.”

Sayomi just smiled, so Langa bowed as best as he could, then cautiously put one foot on his skateboard and pushed off with the other, weaving through the crowds of people with as much delicacy as he could manage. Every jolt of the skateboard hitting a bump in the ground caused Langa to immediately shift his gaze to Reki’s face, but the soft, unintelligible murmurings from the boy showed that he wasn’t in unbearable pain and soon helped Langa to relax.

Langa skated along the main road, dodging in and out of the pathway of cars, for what felt like hours. Every moment that time ticked by pressed more agitation into his system, as Sayomi’s warning that the oxygen tank would only last a few hours cycled through the forefront of his mind again and again. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was going, and a sense of doom started to press down on him the longer he was alone with his thoughts. He didn’t dare to take breaks longer than a minute or two, and even then, he only stopped moving and refused to even think about attempting to put Reki down. He could feel Reki’s heart beating against his back, a steadying presence that he subconsciously began to meditate on as he rested. 

Finally, after the sun had stretched across the sky and Langa had been skating for the majority of the afternoon, he began to see people in hospital gowns, clustered together and walking slowly all in the same direction. Some looked egregiously tired, like they had been out here all day. He saw others begin to join them, likely people who had been injured by the earthquake somehow in the midst of their own daily lives. He began to follow them, quickly passing by them with the speed of his skateboard, and at last came to their destination, the city’s main general hospital. 

Langa rolled to a stop and kicked his skateboard to the corner of the pavement, unable to pick it up with his hands full. He slowly lumbered inside, catching his breath which was coming out in long huffs, and his heart sank at the sight of the waiting room. Almost every seat in the place was taken, mostly by patients from the other hospital who had been caught up in the landslide. Nurses and doctors were practically running, carrying clipboards, medical supplies, and harried faces as they tried to attend to the most pressing matters. 

“Is that boy injured?” A nurse pressed in on Langa and he just nodded, still too tired to even speak. “Here, there’s an open chair for him. I’m afraid you’ll have to stand.”

“That’s...totally fine,” Langa huffed, almost collapsing as he lowered to his knees and carefully tilted Reki onto the chair the nurse provided. 

Reki’s head rolled back and the nurse caught it before it hit the back of the chair. She carefully lowered his head against the chair back before backing away to get a better look at him, and Langa kneeled close to the side of the chair as he watched her work. 

“Um,” Langa interjected while the nurse was examining the bruising on Reki’s forehead. “Those bruises and stitches are old. I’m worried about his oxygen. I think it might be out soon.” 

He shoved the tank forward. It was much lighter than when their journey had first started, and the look on the nurse’s face confirmed his fear.

“Another ten or fifteen minutes and you’d be lugging around an empty tank,” she confirmed. “We’re swamped right now, so we can’t take your friend until we clear out some of the other patients, but I can at least get another tank for now. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay, that’s better than nothing. Thank you.”

As the nurse raced off to check for another tank, Langa began biting at his nails as he concentrated hard on the floor tiles. He didn’t think he was one to let his nerves manifest physically like this, but the last few weeks had put him through the wringer more intensely than he could ever have imagined. 

“Hey, sweetie, it’s okay!” the nurse said as she came back, immediately catching sight of Langa’s anxiety. “I have a tank that will last another eight hours right here, and by then I’m sure we’ll have him all patched up. These stitches on his leg look fresh, but masterfully done, so I think he’s okay to hang out here for a little bit. I’m sorry about that, but we simply don’t have the resources to take him in right now.”

“I understand,” Langa said quietly, and he instinctively grabbed Reki’s hand as the nurse knelt down and began unhooking the empty tank from the tube running to his oxygen mask. A succession of quiet coughs shook Reki’s body, and Langa locked eyes with the nurse as his grip on Reki tightened.

“Everything’s fine,” she murmured, the slightest hint of annoyance and overwork beginning to cross over her face. Langa forced himself to look elsewhere as she rolled the tank away and began setting up the new one, picking up the pace as Reki coughed again.

“There,” the nurse said as she stood up. “See, hun? Nothing to worry about.”

But the anxiety stretching across Langa’s face had only increased. He had caught sight of something across the waiting room that made his heart pound straight out of his chest.

“Um, who is that man?”

The nurse couldn’t help from tutting her lips as she followed Langa’s gaze over to the check-in desk, where a haggard doctor was deep in conversation with a well-composed man dressed in a smart blue suit, adorned with a red tie and complimented well by his slicked back blue hair. 

_ ADAM, _ Langa thought, rage suddenly bubbling up and fighting with anxiety for space in his brain.  _ That’s him, I’m sure of it.  _ He felt his hands begin to shake and pressed closer to Reki’s chair. The man looked up, meeting Langa’s eyes across the room, and smiled. Langa’s grip around Reki’s hand tightened so much that he heard a small pop, and the IV port fell onto the seat of the chair.

“Oh, that guy?” The nurse asked, not registering the change in Langa’s disposition. “He’s a top member of the board of trustees. He’s cranked a lot of money into this place and he visits often. He even volunteered to pay for medical expenses for everyone affected in the earthquake today! Oh...” She had noticed the droplets of blood rolling off of Reki’s hand and quickly ran off to find some bandages, leaving Langa in a deadlock stare with ADAM. 

“Don’t come…” Langa whispered, too shaken to say it any louder and unwilling to draw attention to himself. 

But the command worked more like an invitation, and ADAM capriciously took a step towards him. He kept walking, his smile growing wider as his pace quickened, and Langa flinched as Reki’s hand fell out of his grip. Langa didn’t want to take his eyes off ADAM, but Reki needed his attention more. He whipped his gaze down to see that the nurse had taken Reki’s hand and was wiping down and bandaging it.

“Is he good to go now?” Langa whispered to the nurse, garnering a quizzical glance from her.

“Uh, yeah,” she said back to him at a normal volume. “Let me check his heart and lungs and make sure he’s breathing fine.” 

Langa turned back to meet ADAM’s eyes as the nurse unwound a stethoscope from around her neck and pressed it to Reki’s chest. ADAM offered a grandiose wave and Langa leapt to his feet, standing defensively in front of the nurse as she attended to Reki. He shook with anger as he saw ADAM then appear to start laughing, still too far away to hear. 

The nurse turned around to report her verdict to Langa and was met with his back, then put her hands on her hips, huffing in frustration.

“Well, he’s fine for now, as long as he stays on oxygen until all this chaos blows over.”

“Awesome!” Langa almost yelled, catching her eye for a moment before pushing past her and scooping Reki into his arms, doing his best to carry all his weight with one side of his body and haul the oxygen tank with the other. He glanced back at ADAM, grimaced, and bolted for the door.

“Hey! You can’t leave!” the nurse screamed, but Langa was moving too quickly and she had too many other responsibilities to bother attempting to track him down.

Langa had already jumped onto his skateboard and made it to the edge of the hospital’s driveway when he saw ADAM exiting the building out of the corner of his eye. He desperately wanted to keep going, feeling the same sense of fear he had the moment ADAM had pulled Reki onto his board, but he felt pulled inexplicably to a standstill the moment he saw the fierce determination seeming to glow on ADAM’s face. He almost tripped as he tried to pump with his leg, his body suddenly wobbly and clumsy, and stopped to keep from crashing forward and crushing Reki.

“Hello, Snow,” ADAM said coyly as he approached, and Langa paled as ADAM extended an arm in his direction.

“Don’t get any closer…” he said with as much shakiness as he had in the waiting room, but more aggression. He began to back away and almost toppled over his skateboard again. 

He looked down at Reki, still asleep with his head lolled against Langa’s shoulder, and tried to think of something to say that would allow him to put some distance between them and the crazed skater who was quickly approaching. He stared at the long line of stitches stretching across Reki’s forehead and all rational thought seemed to fade away. 

A shadow suddenly loomed across Reki’s face, bathing his stitches and his barely-shut eyes in darkness, and a hand was brushing his red curls away from the purple bruising that blossomed across his forehead. Hot breath swept in close to Langa’s ear, and Langa looked up again to meet ADAM’s eyes, inches from his own and glinting brightly as he smiled down at Reki. 

Langa snapped.

His knee jerked upward before he had even finished processing his thoughts, and his foot delivered a solid kick to ADAM’s shin. ADAM cried out and backed away a few paces, but his smile remained as he locked eyes with Langa again. 

“I said don’t come any closer!” Langa bellowed firmly this time, pulling Reki’s face to his chest and shielding him. 

“Relax, Snow,” ADAM said calmly, dropping down to the concrete and sitting down, legs folded. He tried to hide it with his casual posture, but Langa could see him rubbing at the spot he had kicked. “Let’s chat. I’d like to know where you’ve been all this time. I’ve missed you, and I thought I’d gotten your attention for sure with all the fun I had with  _ him. _ ” ADAM curled his finger slowly as he pointed at Reki. 

“Yeah, asshole, well your plan backfired!” Langa roared, stomping a foot as he grew more infuriated by ADAM’s body language. “Reki was right! I should have stayed away from you from the beginning!” His voice faltered as he went on. “If I hadn’t agreed to your stupid beef, Reki and I would be hanging out like usual right now, skating because we love it and not to win some stupid competition against a prick like you. Stay away from me, and  _ stay away from Reki _ .” 

He turned and scrambled onto his skateboard again, pushing off and moving straight into lightning-bolt speed as he left ADAM behind. He had no more time or space for that man’s words, and he understood that more clearly than ever the moment ADAM had touched Reki’s skin.

The wind was flying through his hair again, and by the time Langa was far enough away from the hospital to feel the sensation of it, he was emotionally wrecked. 

“How can I love this feeling one day, and hate it  _ so much _ the next?” he panted, ducking his head down close to Reki’s to try to escape from it. “How can I be so conflicted, when you taught me to  _ love  _ it?” He stared down at Reki as he asked him, tearing up as he knew an answer from Reki wouldn’t follow. 

ADAM had crushed skating in every sense for Langa, he understood it firmly now, and he didn’t know if things would ever go back to the way they were before. He needed Reki to tell him which way was up and which was down, but he was the one who had to keep it together for Reki. Reki was the one hurting, and he couldn’t forget that. 

Langa stopped to catch his breath and groaned from carrying all the weight of the oxygen tank in one hand. He pulled over to the side of the road, where a small bench provided a place for him to sit down and recover while he held Reki. He wasn’t sure where he was heading anyway, and he needed to clear his mind. The next hospital was too far away to get to on a skateboard and the sun was beginning to set. He stared at his feet, waiting for a bright idea to hit him, but the tiredness flooding his body weighed his brain down.

“L-Langa…”

Langa bolted forward at the sound of Reki’s voice, muffled through his oxygen mask, and stared intensely at him.

“Reki?”

“ADAM… I won’t… believe you… S-stay away… fr-rom L-Langa.”

Langa sighed and leaned back against the bench, pulling Reki’s head up to rest on his shoulder. He was just mumbling in his sleep, probably delirious from the pain and all of the drugs that had been circling through his system for weeks now. 

“Don’t worry, Reki. I’m keeping my distance,” he breathed. 

He looked up at the sky again, feeling a prick of anxiety in his heart as nighttime shades of purple and orange began to settle across it.  _ He deserves one night of normalcy before going back to the hospital, if his body can handle it. His house is too far away, but mine is close. And it’s closer to the nearest hospital than where we are now, so I can head out early in the morning and get Reki checked in there and still make it to school on time… School. With all the crazy stuff going on right now, I still manage to worry about school?  _ Langa shook his head.

“Okay, better get moving,” he said aloud to Reki’s still sleeping form. “You’re officially spending the night at my house. Hope Mom’s okay with that.”

He slowly stood up, making sure to support Reki’s ribs as closely to the way Sayomi had shown him as possible. Reki didn’t cry out or mumble in his sleep at all.

“I think I’m getting better at this,” he smiled softly as he shifted carefully onto the skateboard and started off again.

As soon as he was at a good pace again, his thoughts returned to his mother. He had abandoned her in the middle of an earthquake--the lowest low he had ever stooped to as her son. But she would understand, wouldn’t she? They had been relatively far away from the epicenter, in a safe part of town, and most of the shaking had subsided by the time Langa had gotten out the door. Still, a sense of guilt seemed to billow around him as he sailed through the quiet streets, and he was almost too wrapped up in it to notice his cell phone ringing in his pocket.

_Could that be Mom? She’s_ _probably worried_ sick _… But I can’t answer it with my hands full!_

Langa’s speed shot up as he moved in a frenzy to make it home faster. His body was  _ so, so _ drained already, but his mother had been kept waiting long enough. The kind of bone-shaking panic that he had felt for Reki when he first saw the hospital on the news was probably going through his mother’s body right now, only with Langa as its focal point. He was getting tunnel vision, the guilt was so all-encompassing.

“Mom!” Langa jumped off his board and kept right on moving as he made it to his house, where his mother was sitting in the chair on the porch with tears streaming down her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t pick up your call!”

“Langa!” She began to sob even harder as she saw him approaching. “Oh, Reki-kun! Look at this poor child! Why did you bring him here, honey?”

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I went to another hospital and there wasn’t any room, and then… well… I decided here would be the best alternative.”

“Well, let’s get him inside,” she murmured, dabbing at her eyes before turning the doorknob and leading him in. “And I didn’t call. I knew you were busy and I had faith you would come home safe.”

_ It wasn’t her? Then who was it?  _ Langa was puzzled, but he tossed the question out of his mind as quickly as it had entered. He didn’t have time for it right now. 

Langa intended to bring Reki to his bedroom, to let him have a decent night’s rest in a proper bed, but when he almost tripped at the front door’s threshold from exhaustion, he knew he wouldn’t get him there.

“The couch, honey, the couch,” his mother pleaded, scooping the oxygen tank out of Langa’s grasp and gently pushing him along. 

Langa made it to the couch and laid Reki down just in time for his own knees to give out. He sank to the floor before reaching for a small cushion to elevate Reki’s broken leg with. He pulled back and surrendered to utter exhaustion, losing his balance and letting his body flop sideways onto the floor next to Reki on the couch. The tears came almost immediately, ugly, loud, and heaving.

“It’s okay, Langa, everything is fine,” his mother whispered into the top of his head. 

She began rubbing at his back as he continued to sob, and he felt the heat of embarrassment rising in his cheeks. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been so emotional in front of his mother, or her so comforting with him. He just knew he hadn’t cried so hard in her arms since he was very, very young. Even over the past few weeks, he had tried his best to remain stoic despite the rare times when he broke down. The walls that had kept him afloat since his father died were coming down fast, and he was too tired to evaluate if that was a good thing or not. 

“Everything is so shitty,” he breathed into his arms, not bothering to censor his cursing around his mom. “Shitty, terrible things keep happening to Reki and I’m powerless to stop them. But it’s all my fault in the first place.” He thought back to the similar conversation they had had before he had left that morning, and he fell silent, realizing his mother couldn’t say much to make him feel better. No one could. 

“Langa,” she said sternly, but still as comfortingly as she could manage. “There’s no way in hell anyone could hold you responsible for a natural disaster. These things just happen sometimes, and sometimes people who have already been in a considerable deal of pain are caught up in them. It’s not about who’s to blame, or bad karma, or anything of the sort. It just happens. What you can take the blame for is  _ saving  _ him. You brought him here, and you’re gonna take good care of him. And I’m gonna help you.”

“...Thanks, Mom.” 

Langa’s heart still stirred in the depths of guilt and anxiety, but his mother was right. Reki was here, and he was safe, and Langa didn’t have to leave him anymore. He could stay right by his side all night and make sure he was okay. So when Langa’s mother got up to make the two of them some tea to calm their nerves, she came back to find Langa fast asleep, his index finger looped around Reki’s. She smiled softly, then laid out a warm blanket over each boy.

“Goodnight,” she whispered, gently tucking Langa’s hair behind his ear, then took her tea into her bedroom and shut the door quietly behind her, settling in to distract herself with a good book while the purple evening settled languidly into a pitch-black night. 


	7. Blue

Langa awoke with a start, opening his eyes slowly to be met with the muted colors of the fabric of his living room couch. He had been dreaming just now, something terrible having to do with Reki, but it had disappeared as soon as he had found himself in his living room again. All that was left now was a chest-tightening sense of uneasiness.

Langa pressed his hands against the floor and moved to lift his body up, but a sudden motion near his ear made him stiffen. He slowly turned his head, letting his hair stream across his cheek, and found Reki’s fingers intertwined in a curl of his hair. 

“Morning, Reki,” Langa whispered softly, reaching up to cup his hand over Reki’s. 

He sat there for a moment, feeling the touch of warmth that had returned to Reki’s skin, before carefully unwinding Reki’s hand from his hair and placing it across his stomach. Langa pulled the blanket up higher on Reki’s torso and kneeled in front of the couch, watching him breathe softly as he slept. As Reki’s chest rose and fell, something from Langa’s dream tugged at the edge of his consciousness. 

“I fell asleep! I never called Reki’s mom!” Langa shouted, jumping to his feet. 

“Relax, Langa!” 

Langa looked up to see his mother standing in the middle of the kitchen area preparing breakfast, smiling softly with a spatula in her hand. 

“Come here,” she beckoned, waving with the spatula, and Langa pulled out the chair at the kitchen table and sat down. She returned to her work at the stove. “Don’t worry about that. I called the hospital last night to tell them we had Reki-kun here and to pass that along to his family. They called back just a few minutes ago and said they informed her. I gave them your cell number to pass along to Reki-kun’s mom, as well.”

Langa shot up from the table and returned to the couch, where he had deposited his cell phone on the coffee table before falling asleep the night before. A few notifications flooded over his screen as he unlocked his phone, the first being a message from Reki’s mother, sent late last night, thanking him for risking so much to take care of Reki. Under that, another notification showed that Langa had a missed call from Joe.

“So that’s who was calling last night,” Langa concluded, sitting down on the ground and crossing his legs as he peered at his phone. He leaned over and rested his head atop his forearms on the edge of the couch, close to Reki’s face, as he scrolled through notifications. He glanced up, then dropped his phone on the ground. “The oxygen! Mom, how long has it been since we got here last night?!”

“About twelve hours, you got here and fell asleep around dinner time. What’s wrong?”

“The oxygen only lasts eight!”

Langa frantically scrambled over to the tank and started prodding around, but he didn’t exactly know what he was looking at, so he returned to Reki’s side. His mother came up to the back of the couch, and the two stared at each other for a moment.

“What do we do, Mom?”

“Honey, just calm down. Reki-kun is breathing just fine. Maybe he doesn’t need it anymore.”

Langa stared down at Reki as he weighed what his mother was saying, and was able to relax a little as the long breaths that Reki had been taking when Langa woke up continued. The oxygen had been depleted long before even then, so Reki had to be okay. He carefully reached out and cradled the back of Reki’s head, then slipped the mask strap over it and removed the mask from his face. As he gently set Reki’s head back down, Langa willed some of his anxiety to wash away at the sight of Reki continuing on as before. He scooped his phone off the floor again and let his head fall on the edge of the couch as he dialed Joe’s number, letting one hand rest over Reki’s chest to feel the rise and fall of his breathing. 

“LANGA!” 

The scream that pierced through the phone did not belong to Joe.

“Cherry?”

“Langa!” Another voice pierced through, much higher pitched. Miya. “We’ve all been worried sick!”

“Are you all together?”

“Yes,” finally, Joe’s voice this time. “We all were on our own when the earthquake hit, but we saw the afternoon news later and saw what happened to the hospital. We ended up all running into each other as we went to find Reki at the hospital, but they wouldn’t let anyone on the premises. We’ve been up all night, frantic about him, and about you after you didn’t answer your phone yesterday. Are you with Reki? Are you both okay?”

“Yeah, I got there right after the earthquake hit. Reki was in bad shape, but he’s doing better now I think. His nurse patched him up and sent us to another hospital, but it was busy, and… ADAM was there… so I brought him back to my house.”

“ADAM?!” Cherry, Miya, Joe, and Shadow all echoed over the phone.

“He apparently is on that hospital’s board of trustees. I just didn’t feel comfortable handing Reki over to the staff there, knowing that.”

“Did you kick his ass?” Shadow screamed.

“Hardly. I did, um, kick him though.” Langa cringed as he heard Cherry fail to suppress a small gasp. “I kinda lost my cool because he touched Reki.”

“He likes you,” Cherry murmured. “So hopefully you didn’t piss him off too much…”

“Can we talk to Reki?” Miya asked after a moment of silence.

“He’s asleep. He passed out yesterday when we were trying to move him around, and he hasn’t regained consciousness yet. I don’t know how he’ll be when he wakes up, but at least he’s breathing on his own.” Langa shifted up to look at Reki’s face as he spoke, and he barely managed to choke out the last few words. “I mean, I’m pretty shaken up myself.” His voice itself began to shake as he continued. 

“Would you mind if we came over to be with you?” Joe asked quietly. Langa shook his head, then sighed as he remembered the others wouldn’t be able to see that. He cleared his throat.

“No, I’ll text you guys with updates. I have my mom here with me, so I’m not alone. And I think I’m gonna do my best to try to make it to school today anyways.”

“Fuck school!” Shadow screamed, trying his best to be sensitive but failing. “You need time to pull yourself together man, you went through a lot yesterday. And you haven’t even told us a lot of it, I’m sure.”

“That’s true,” Langa sighed. “Thank you for calling, guys. You all should sleep if you can, if you were really up all night.”

“You, too. We’ll give you your space, and we’ll all see each other soon, when we’re all in better shape.” Joe said, then hung up the line after the others shouted out quick goodbyes.

“Did I hear you tell someone you’re planning on going to school today?!” Langa’s mother shouted from the kitchen, where the fan over the stove almost drowned out her voice. “Take one day off! The teachers will understand after everything that happened yesterday! You’re probably not the only student who won’t be there.”

Langa looked at the time on his phone, 7:32 a.m. Even if he wanted to go to school, he probably wouldn’t make it there on time without skipping a shower and breakfast. And with the events that had unfolded yesterday, he needed both _desperately._

“I suppose I can play hookey for one day,” he said, running his palm lightly over Reki’s forehead. “I need to make sure you’re okay, after all. Oh…”

As his fingers ran over the textured stitching on Reki’s forehead, he was reminded of the nurse at ADAM’s hospital, which in turn reminded him of Sayomi. He sat back and pulled the slip of paper she had given him out of his shirt pocket.

“It might be too early to call, given how rough her day was…”

Langa let himself dial the number anyway, and he was surprised to hear the line pick up after the second ring.

“Sayomi-san? It’s Langa!” he said before she had even uttered a word.

“Langa-kun! Oh, thank goodness!”

“How are you doing, Sayomi-san? How is your leg?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine! I was cleared to go home once more emergency staff showed up and my fiancé came and got me. What about Reki-kun? What hospital did you end up at?”

“We, uh, couldn’t find another one. We’re at my house.”

“What?! What about Reki-kun’s oxygen? He _needs_ to be hospitalized!”

“It ran out, but he’s breathing fine.”

“Let me talk to him. I can evaluate his symptoms.”

Langa cringed, staring at Reki’s chest moving up and down. It was one thing to reject his friends’ requests to speak to Reki, but to reject a nurse’s and still act like everything was fine?

“He hasn’t woken up yet, but,” Langa scrambled for anything to reassure Sayomi, and himself. He blushed as he found the answer. “I stayed with him all night and when I woke up, his hand was all wrapped up in my hair, so I dunno, he might have woken up for a short time…”

“...Fine, moving him around again will cause him more stress anyway, and hospitals are still swamped…” Langa could almost hear Sayomi thinking over the phone. “If he doesn’t wake up soon, you call me right back. I’ll get you into a hospital whatever the cost. Keep me updated!”

Langa held back a laugh, seeing the similarities start to arise between Sayomi and his friends.

_Might as well put her in a group chat with all of them…_

“I will. I hope your leg heals quickly, too, Sayomi-san.”

Just as he hung up the call, his mother came over and set down two heaping plates of food on the coffee table. Langa’s stomach began growling loudly, and he laughed sheepishly.

“You must be starving,” his mother said as she sat down and spread a napkin over her lap, then handed one to Langa. “You didn’t eat dinner last night. I made enough for Reki-kun, too, if he’s able to eat any.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Langa swiveled around to face the table and dug in, his stomach finally silencing as the first bite hit his tongue. He and his mother ate in silence, the stress draping around his shoulders like a heavy wet blanket and the concern visibly manifesting on her face as she glanced at him, then at the boy sleeping just past his shoulder, from time to time. 

When they had both finished eating, Langa stood up and began collecting the plates.

“Honey, don’t bother with that, I’ll get it.”

“But you cooked! I’ll clean up.”

“Just take it easy. You did a lot yesterday.”

Langa wanted to protest, but he found the aching in his muscles to be enough evidence in support of her argument. He handed the plates off to her straight away. He wanted to change out of yesterday’s clothes, but even after so much sleep and some food in his belly, he was still drained of energy. Instead, he just sat down on the ground again and rolled his blanket up around him. 

“Ten minutes, then I’ll get up.” He mumbled into his knees, which he had pulled up to his chest.

“No need to explain it to me,” his mother joked from over at the sink, where she was tidying up the dishes. She placed two cups of water on the coffee table before retreating to her room. “I still have to go to work today, unfortunately,” she shouted through the crack in the door. “But if you need something, I will come running.” 

Langa just watched over Reki as his mother prepared for work, mentally preparing himself to go through the effort of bathing. On any other day, it was just a simple part of life, but on a day when all of his energy was shot, it was something to be dreaded. But he needed to do it before his mom left for work. He didn’t want to leave Reki unattended. He finally stood up as she was coming out of her room.

“I’m leaving in fifteen minutes,” she smiled at him.

“Okay, I’ll try to be fa--”

“AHHH!!!”

Langa jumped out of his skin and almost fell backwards over the coffee table as Reki’s scream reverberated across the living room. He bolted forward and spread his arms out over Reki’s chest, keeping him pinned down as his eyes snapped open, wide with fear, and he moved instinctively to sit up. 

“Hey! Hey!” Langa shouted, gripping Reki’s shoulders tightly. “Reki, you’re safe, you’re at my house. It’s Langa!”

Reki was muttering repeatedly under his breath, and as Langa reached forward to smooth his tangled hair down and comfort him, he was able to make out what he was saying.

“A-ADAM… ADAM, n-no… s-stop… AD-DAM…”

“He’s not here, Reki,” Langa said close to Reki’s ear as he pressed him into a hug he hoped to be calming. “It’s just me, Langa. Can you see me?”

He took Reki’s hand and lifted it up to his own face, pressing it to his cheek, then pulling back as Reki’s eyes began to focus on him and he began to grip at Langa’s face with his own strength. Reki was pale and shaky, sweat pooling at his temples, but he was breathing well enough and his eyes were beginning to take on some clarity, like he was coming into awareness of whose face was in front of his, despite seeming disoriented. 

“A million shades of blue,” Reki mumbled, brushing his thumb over the skin near the corner of Langa’s eye. 

His voice was barely audible, dry and cracking with every other word, and trailing into silence by the last, but just hearing him speak was enough for Langa to lose all composure. He took Reki’s hand again and let his head fall to Reki’s shoulder, where he lingered as Reki stared up at the room around him.

“Honey, he needs water,” Langa’s mother’s voice was close, and he blushed a beet-red, having completely forgotten that she was standing directly over Reki’s head at the end of the couch. He shot up to see her holding one of the cups she had set on the table.

“Thanks,” he said quietly, then turned back to Reki after taking it out of her hand. She kneeled down next to him. “Reki, this is my mom.”

Reki seemed not to register exactly what Langa was saying, but he let his eyes follow as Langa gently tipped his head in his mother’s direction. As Langa’s mother smiled at him, Reki’s eyes seemed to warm up a bit, and his lips curled up as if he were trying to return her kind gesture. He was too exhausted to do it successfully, though. 

“Here,” Langa said, slipping his hand behind Reki’s head and tilting it up, then bringing the cup to his lips. 

Langa cringed as he watched Reki drink, taking small sips with long pauses in between as he gave himself time to breathe. Reki was obviously just as thirsty now as he had been when he woke up from his coma, when he had had oxygen through his nose to help him be able to gulp down water so quickly. But this time, drinking was so much more difficult for him, and it seemed to tire him out. He pulled away from the cup after only a few sips. 

“Langa…” he said after a moment, and Langa felt a stirring of happiness at Reki’s awareness despite how coarse and strained Reki’s voice was. “What… hap--” He cut himself off and took in a large breath, getting ready to try again, when Langa interjected.

“Drink some more, if you can.” He lifted the cup up again, and Reki took a few more small sips before Langa lowered his head to the pillow again. He leaned back and placed the cup on the table behind him.

“I’m sorry about this horrible timing, sweetie, but I have to go,” Langa’s mother said softly into his ear. “I’m going to call Reki-kun’s mother on my way to work and tell her he’s awake. Maybe she’ll come by later.”

“Okay,” Langa nodded, and she kissed the top of his head before standing up. She leaned over and lightly ran her palm over the top of Reki’s head as well. “I hope you feel better soon, Reki-kun.”

Reki looked like he wanted to say something to her, but he seemed to lose track of where her face was as she stood up straight again. His wandering eyes instead made their way over to Langa as she slipped out the front door. 

“I got you out of the hospital parking lot,” Langa leaned in close to Reki and began to explain as soon as his mother had left. He took the cloth napkin that he had left unused on the table after breakfast and began to dab at the sweat on Reki’s forehead. “I got you to another hospital, but there was no room, so we ended up here.”

“How?” Reki said almost under his breath.

“I skateboarded while holding you,” Langa smiled, and Reki’s eyes lit up.

“That’s awesome,” he breathed, and Langa laughed.

He knew he should probably tell Reki that he had run into ADAM at the hospital, especially because the others knew and he didn’t want them to bring it up around Reki accidentally in the future, but Reki just didn’t look like he had the strength to handle that conversation at the moment. 

“How are you feeling? Do you want to try and find another hospital?”

Reki shook his head as vigorously as he could manage, which wasn’t very hard at all.

“No more hospitals, please… I’ve had enough.”

“Okay,” Langa agreed. “I feel the same way. I don’t think I can handle the stress anymore.” Reki smiled. 

“Can I… have some more… water?”

Reki did his best to take longer sips this time, more quickly, as Langa held his head up, but Langa pulled the cup away and chided him to take his time. They sat in silence until the cup was empty.

“Want more?”

“No… Is Sayomi okay, and the guys? They weren’t… caught up in anything… because of the earthquake… right?”

“They’re all fine, and Sayomi’s at home now, too,” Langa reassured him, and he saw relief wash over Reki’s face. A bit of color returned to his cheeks, and he actually managed a smile as he stared up at the ceiling. “They’re all worried about you, though.”

“I’m fine, too,” he murmured. “I just... need more sleep.”

“Then sleep,” Langa encouraged him. “I enjoy your company, but I’ll manage.”

Reki squeezed his hand lightly before shutting his eyes and sinking deeper into his pillow. Langa pulled the blanket up around his shoulders again, and Reki nestled under it.

“Man, even a couch… beats a bed in a hospital…” he whispered, his eyes still closed.

Langa waited until he was fast asleep again before even considering getting up and moving around the house. He couldn’t stand sitting around in the same clothes from yesterday anymore, and having Reki wake up had given him the missing energy he needed, so he slipped into his bedroom, leaving the door open to keep his ears trained for Reki, and made his way to the connected bathroom. He wanted to bathe quickly, to get back to Reki as soon as possible in case he was needed, but as Langa slipped into the steaming hot water after rinsing off, he couldn’t resist soaking for a few minutes. The heat seemed to instill new life into his tired muscles, and he realized there had been a cold knot in his chest over the last few days that was only starting to slowly unravel now.

Langa tried not to think as he padded back into his room, damp feet dotting the floor with drops of water, and threw on some sweatpants and a sweater. He wanted the relaxation from his bath to last as long as possible, so he could be in the right mindset to get Reki back on his feet quickly. He went out into the living room again, where Reki hadn’t moved an inch, and took his spot on the floor with a book and a towel to dry his hair. 

Several hours passed, the only sign of Reki stirring a tilt of his head to one side or the other every now and then, and Langa began getting hungry again. Breakfast had been huge, but it hadn’t been enough to make up for skipping a meal. He looked back at Reki.

_I don’t even know the last time he’s eaten. He’ll probably wake up even more starving than I was this morning, and if he had that much trouble with water, he might not be able to eat at all._

He got up and began rummaging around in the kitchen, looking for soft foods or any ideas for recipes. Suddenly, his phone began to buzz on the coffee table.

“Shit! It could be Reki’s mom! Mom said she might want to stop by!”

Langa ran back to the living room area and swiped his phone off the table, then sat down with his back against the couch as he looked at caller ID.

“Mom?”

“Hey, sweetie, I’m on my break right now and I just wanted to see how things are going.”

“Reki went back to sleep. I thought you might have been his mom.”

“I called her on my way to work! She was so excited to hear Reki-kun was awake and doing okay without any oxygen. I think visiting him at the hospital has been just as stressful for her as it has been for you. I mean, she is his mother…”

“Is she coming today?”

“No, she wants Reki-kun to get more rest. It’s tearing her to pieces, but she said she shouldn’t come. Maybe tomorrow?”

Langa turned to look at Reki, then lowered his voice.

“I hope she visits soon. I think Reki needs her.”

“Don’t stress about it, Langa. She loves him very much, and she knows what’s best, as his mother. I have to go now, my lunch break is pretty much over, but I’m going to try to leave early tonight to get back home quickly. I love you!”

“Love you, too, Mom.”

Langa put the phone down and stared at Reki, then felt tears beginning to well up. After talking to his mom, all he could do was picture her in Reki’s mother’s position, him in Reki’s. If he knew anything about his own mom, he imagined that he knew a bit about Reki’s mom and that she was probably in agonizing pain right now. He picked up his phone and scrolled to the message he had received from her.

_“I’m looking forward to whenever you’re able to come see Reki. I know he’ll be excited to see you,”_ he typed, then sent it off. It wasn’t much, but he wanted her to know somehow that he realized her emotional state.

Reki didn’t look like he would be waking up again for a while, so Langa ended up making a small meal for himself and eating it at the kitchen table as he dove into his book again. By the time he looked up, the sun was already setting through the living room window, and his mother was walking through the door.

“Is Reki-kun still sleeping?” she asked as she swung by the table, pecking a quick kiss at the top of Langa’s head and scooping up his empty plate from lunch. 

“Think so,” Langa replied, but he closed the book and made his way over to the couch again. His mother soon joined him, a small cup of tea in her hands.

“He looks a bit better,” she whispered.

Reki had shifted around a bit during his sleep so that his face was pressed against the back cushion of the couch, and he was just teetering on the edge of rolling over onto his side. Any further movement, and he would most likely wake up in some considerable pain.

“I think we should straighten him out, Mom, he’s got chest injuries and I don’t think it’s good for him to lay that way.”

She put her tea down and scooted over, and Langa carefully sat down on the edge of the couch to more easily lift Reki up. He lightly gripped Reki’s shoulder, and Reki startled awake.

“Hey, sorry,” Langa said right away, pulling back.

“It’s okay,” Reki said, seeming much more aware of his surroundings than earlier. He slowly shifted around so that his back was flat against the couch again, and Langa refrained from barking at him to be careful with his movement. “What’s up?”

“I was just trying to move you. You looked uncomfortable… Are you okay?” 

Reki’s dramatic awakening that morning had made Langa nervous that something similar might happen the next time Reki woke up, and though it didn’t seem like he had been dreaming just now, he had been jumpy. Langa’s simple touch had startled him. Reki didn’t seem to understand that this was what Langa meant with his question, though.

“I feel a lot better,” was his reply, and Reki offered Langa a huge grin.

“How about eating something?” Langa’s mother leaned in and smiled at Reki. So she had been harboring the same worry. “I’ll whip up a bit of an early dinner.” Reki nodded shyly and Langa’s mother raced over to the kitchen to start cooking.

“Woah!” Langa turned back from watching her go to find Reki in the process of sitting up. He stood up and took hold of Reki’s arms. “Careful!”

“I’m getting tired of being babied,” Reki sighed. “I know how to do this safely now, Sayomi showed me. Just let me hold onto your hand.”

Langa didn’t say anything, choosing to relent as he sat back down on the edge of the couch and offered Reki his arm. He was speaking without much hesitation now, and he seemed headstrong enough, so there was nothing Langa could really say to convince him to slow down. He thought about how Reki had blacked out yesterday, despite Langa and Sayomi doing their best to be careful in pulling him up, but Reki had already been in an extreme amount of pain before they had even started pulling him up. Now would be different. It had to be.

And it was. Reki gritted his teeth a little bit as they worked together to get him to a sitting position, but he was fine once they got there. Langa adjusted the pillow behind his back, and the two sat staring at each other on the couch.

“Thanks,” Reki finally said.

“Here we are!” Langa’s mother chimed before he could reply, bringing a bowl of soup over on a small tray and placing it over Reki’s lap. “Langa told me the soup you had at the hospital tasted like water, so I hope mine is better.”

Reki blushed and shot a glance at Langa. “I’m sure it will be.”

Langa’s mother handed another bowl to him, then dished up her own soup and sat at the kitchen table. Langa supposed he should go and sit down at a proper table to eat, but anxiety prevented him from moving from his spot on the couch. He watched Reki swallow his first spoonful, then slowly start working through the bowl. It wasn’t easy, and Langa could tell that Reki was caught up in a mixture of pain and caution to make sure he breathed properly. He also seemed distracted, like something bouncing around in his thoughts was taking up the space he needed to devote to concentrating on breathing. He didn’t really participate in the conversation Langa and his mother held, and Langa couldn’t be sure if that was the reason why. But the smile that slowly spread across his face showed that yes, the soup was _much_ better than any of the hospital food that Reki had been eating over the past weeks. 

“It’s so good!” Reki squealed when Langa’s mother returned to collect his tray. “I want more, but you’ll be sitting here watching me eat it for another hour if I do,” he half-giggled in Langa’s direction. 

“That’s fine with me,” Langa smiled, but Reki shook his head. 

“I… don’t think I’ve ever seen you in sweatpants before.” Reki suddenly said, changing the subject.

“There’s a first for everything,” Langa replied with a chuckle. “I never thought I would see you sitting on my couch in a hospital gown, covered in dirt.”

“Covered in dirt?!” Reki looked down at his body, then noticed the patches across his gown and his caked fingernails. 

“And blood,” Langa added, pulling away the blanket to reveal the dried blood that had clotted around the long line of stitches stretching across Reki’s left leg. Much of it had also spilled onto the white plaster of his right leg’s cast. “Wanna get cleaned up?”

Reki stared at his leg for a moment, the newest addition to his set of injuries properly registering in his mind for the first time since being relieved of both the pain and the morphine. But he shook it off, seeming to quickly be getting used to the idea that bad things would just continue to happen to him, and nodded at Langa.

“I’ll give you some of my clothes to wear,” Langa said as he slowly pulled Reki’s legs onto the floor. He stood up and looped one arm around Reki’s back, the other under his legs, and groaned a bit as he scooped him up, his muscles aching. “Looks like I’m not completely recovered from lugging you around yesterday.”

Reki groaned too, from pain in his ribs, and then started laughing.

“We’re a mess,” he said through gasps, and quickly stopped to keep from losing control of his breathing. But he smiled up at Langa like he could go on laughing forever. 

“Alright, Mr. Dysfunctional,” Langa joked as he began heading towards his bedroom. “If I couldn’t walk, we’d be toast.”

“Don’t forget to cover his casts!” Langa’s mother yelled from the kitchen, and chucked a box of plastic bags over Langa’s head into the bedroom.

He ignored it initially as he proceeded into the bathroom and set Reki down on the edge of the bathtub, then circled back to swipe it up and search for tape in his desk. He began running the water in the tub as he set to work wrapping the cast on Reki’s leg with the bags and the tape.

“I don’t know what we’re gonna do about getting the blood off this. We can’t get it wet…”

“Maybe you should just sign it a bunch of times in thick black pen to cover it up, like how kids used to do in middle school?” Reki chuckled, throwing up his hands in a shrug. 

“In your dreams,” Langa rolled his eyes, but ended up laughing, too. He made short work of wrapping up the cast on Reki’s arm, then stepped back. “Okay, do you want me to give you the room, or…”

He instantly flashed back to the moment he had been requested to give Reki a sponge bath, and how flustered Reki had been when he had heard. He could feel redness burning in his cheeks even now, and he could see a tint spreading over Reki’s face as well. 

“I don’t think I can do this by myself…” Reki said quietly, his blush exaggerating with every word he said, until his face was bright red. 

_Okay, do not make a big deal about this._ Langa stammered in his head. _Japan has onsen where dudes are naked in front of each other all the time, right? This is just like that. Just like that._ That thought process made him think back to the thoughts he had had while wiping down the comatose Reki’s face, how he had wanted to go to an onsen with him, and Langa’s face was suddenly on fire. 

“No problem,” he said, just as quietly as Reki had spoken. 

Reki had started untying the strings on his gown, and he was even struggling to do such a simple task with one arm in a cast. Langa took over for him and untied everything quickly, Reki choosing to distract himself by looking at the bottles of shampoo and conditioner on the shelf, high out of Reki’s reach. Langa tried not to let his eyes linger for too long on Reki’s body, but he couldn’t help noticing the bruises that still dotted the skin over his ribcage. He shouldn’t have expected them to be any lighter than they were yesterday, but they were still a shock.

Langa pulled the sleeves away from Reki’s arms and focused intensely on navigating getting the gown around Reki’s cast, after which Reki scrambled to do as much of the process by himself as possible. He swung his casted leg up and over into the tub, then tried to pull the rest of his body in despite a loud hiss of pain. He couldn’t manage it, though, with the state of his left leg making it hard to bend, and his ribs making it near-impossible to lean even slightly. 

“Let me help you,” Langa murmured, and he carefully lowered Reki into the water. 

This was the first time he had fully seen and touched Reki’s bare torso since the accident, and he was even more frail than he had seemed in the hospital a few days ago. He was much thinner than Langa had ever remembered him being, to the point where he could easily see Reki’s spine, and even some of his ribs were visible as he breathed in. To lose so much weight in less than a month, Reki really wasn’t able to eat much at all. 

“I know I joked with you the other day, but we gotta get you some real food, man.”

Reki was in too much pain to respond, and grew even more flustered as Langa unconsciously revealed that he had been looking at his body. The moment he was in the tub, he sunk low into the water and let it cover his head before popping up again, cheeks still burning red. Langa handed him soap and shampoo from the shelves above the bath, then turned and faced the opposite direction, leaning up against the outside wall of the bath. 

“You okay?” 

“Yeah, I’ll manage.” 

The two boys were silent then, as Langa listened to the soft splashing and scrubbing signaling that Reki was starting by getting the dirt off of his arms. More splashing, and Langa heard Reki’s breath catch. He whipped around.

“You sure?”

He averted his eyes again as they made eye contact.

“Actually, no,” Reki breathed out. “I can’t lift my arms above my head.”

Langa looked down at Reki’s arms. His right arm, especially towards his shoulder, still had patches of dirt on it where Reki couldn’t reach with the cast on his left arm. Langa glanced quickly downwards, noting that Reki hadn’t even attempted to clean the stitches on his leg yet. 

“Turn towards the wall.” 

Langa took Reki’s hand and scraped off the shampoo that he had poured into it. He gathered as much of it as he could manage into his own hands as Reki turned away from him and carefully leaned up against the side of the tub. He lifted his knees up to allow himself more room in the narrow space, doing his best not to vocalize the pain of bending, but Langa heard the small curse he mumbled under his breath. 

Langa worked quickly for that very reason, not wanting Reki to have to sit sideways in the bathtub any longer, but despite his pain, it seemed that Reki was being relaxed by Langa’s massaging of the shampoo into his hair. He closed his eyes and let his head lean back, essentially falling into Langa’s hands, and Langa was able to stay seated as he washed Reki’s hair. The redness in Reki’s cheeks even began to fade away as Langa ran clean water through his hair. Langa pulled away, but Reki didn’t move.

“Done,” he said slowly after a moment, and Reki seemed to come back to himself.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “I was remembering something from my childhood. When my mom used to wash my hair, like before I was old enough to do it myself. I kinda feel useless like that, now.”

Langa scooped up the soap from the side of the tub and began rubbing at the patches of dirt near Reki’s shoulder without saying anything back, wanting his actions to be enough for Reki to know that he would be there for him throughout anything. He pulled back again once that was done, and Reki swiveled around to stretch his legs out again. It was hard to tell with all the water dripping into his face, but Langa could see tears in Reki’s eyes.

“Are you in pain?”

“Uh, emotionally, maybe…” Reki whispered back, then turned his head to face Langa head-on. He opened his mouth to say something, then just shook his head and looked forward again. “Sorry, I don’t think I can reach my leg either.”

“I know,” Langa said softly, moving to the other end of the tub. He carefully elevated Reki’s leg out of the water and began dabbing lightly at the stitches with a wet washcloth. 

Just as he put it down and stood to get a dry towel, there was a knock at the bathroom door.

“Mom?”

“I remembered something, sweetie,” she said, her voice muffled through the door. “Reki-kun shouldn’t submerge his stitches in water. Am I too late?”

“...Yes,” Langa sighed. “What do we do?”

“Just make sure it’s really, really dry! It could get infected, but not if you’re really good about that.”

Langa opened up the linen closet on the far side of the bathroom and took out towels of several sizes. He returned to the bath, where he had thankfully left Reki’s leg propped up on the edge and away from the water. It had already been well soaked, but at least it wouldn’t be in there any longer.

“Okay, let’s get you out and into some clothes. I’ll drain the water later.”

Reki nodded, but then a look of confusion passed over his face as Langa just stood there.

“Um, Langa?”

“I’m trying to figure out how to do this without causing you a ton of pain.”

“I can suck it up and bear it,” Reki half-joked, but Langa really didn’t see a way around it. 

“Okay,” he said, then sucked in a breath. “Promise me you won’t pass out.”

“Can’t do that.”

Langa gave Reki a hard stare, but then rolled up his sleeves and placed a towel on the edge of the tub. Then he leaned over behind Reki’s back and looped his arms underneath Reki’s.

“Okay, I’m gonna pull you up on the count of three, so be ready. One… Two-Three!”

Langa heaved Reki out of the tub by the armpits and set him down on top of the towel, then folded it across him as Reki began to pant. Langa scooped up Reki’s feet and swiveled them around to the floor of the bathroom.

“Reki, you okay?” He was panting too hard to talk. “Thumbs up if you’re okay, thumbs down if you need help.”

Reki offered a thumbs up, and Langa leaned back on his heels to fall into a deep sigh of relief. He took another towel and started patting at Reki’s hair, then draped it around his shoulders as his breathing began to level out. Reki reached out and grasped it, wrapping it tighter around him as the temperature difference from the warm bathwater to the cold bathroom made him start to shiver on top of everything else. 

“You’re gonna want to punch me, but I gotta dry off your stitches, like my mom said,” Langa mumbled, kneeling down in front of Reki with a smaller towel. “I’ll try not to hurt you, but I’m gonna wrap this around your leg and hold it there for a minute or so.”

Reki just nodded, dropping his head down tiredly as he stared at his leg. Langa moved gingerly to wrap the towel around and press it there, and he felt Reki’s hand grip his shoulder as he applied the pressure. He looked up.

“I’m fine,” Reki finally spoke. “Just keep going. I need to hold onto something to keep from punching you.” 

Langa laughed, impressed that Reki was still able to throw out a joke at his own expense after getting knocked down so many times. Reki smiled, too, even as his grip tightened on Langa’s shoulder. 

“You’re amazing,” Reki whispered, just as a similar thought was racing through Langa’s head about Reki. “Who else would go to the lengths you have for someone like me?”

“Reki… You’re my best friend. Stuff like this, it’s the least I could do.”

Suddenly, Reki’s body was moving, and Langa thought he was falling forward, maybe losing consciousness, but then the grip on his shoulder disappeared and Reki’s arm was around his neck. Reki’s head pressed against Langa’s shoulder, his damp hair tickling Langa’s ear. Langa let the towel in his hand fall to the floor as he reached up and wrapped his arms softly across Reki’s back. He could feel Reki’s body shivering, wrapped in just a towel, but he didn’t want to pull away. They stayed motionless while Langa’s sweater absorbed the dampness of Reki’s hair, his skin, his tears. 

“You’re gonna get a cold,” he whispered finally, rubbing his hand through the knotted mess of Reki’s freshly-washed hair. He pushed him back into a sitting position on the edge of the tub, then rubbed the towel across his body once more before beginning to peel the tape and the bags off of Reki’s casts. Once finished, he stood. “I’m gonna grab some clothes from my room. Move, and you’re dead.”

“Mmm,” Reki sniffled, staring at the floor.

Langa kept looking back at him as he moved across the bathroom and out into his room, but Reki’s expression didn’t change. It wasn’t pained or sad, but tears were still forming at the corners of his eyes. He would reach up now and then to wipe them away. Was he crying because he was _happy_? Happy because of _Langa_?

_I’m just doing what any friend should. Did he not believe I cared about him this much?_

Thoughts kept swirling through Langa’s mind as he ruffled through drawers of his dresser, trying to find the most comfortable, easiest-to-put-on clothes that he owned. He came up with a simple baggy blue t-shirt and some black basketball shorts.

Langa didn’t even ask if Reki wanted any help, he just took him by the arm and started pulling away towels and bunching up the t-shirt to get it around his cast. Putting clothes on Reki’s bottom half proved to be way more of a challenge, as every bend and movement of either leg was like snapping a sentient toothpick. At one point, Reki just went limp in Langa’s arms, knowing it would be easier for both of them if he just surrendered all movement.

“Alright,” Langa said finally, after managing to get Reki fully dressed. “Piggyback ride time.”

He turned around and scooped up Reki’s legs, then leaned back so that Reki could more easily slide onto his back. Once Reki was securely hanging on, Langa leaned down and flipped open the drain in the tub, then switched off the bathroom light and moved back into the bedroom.

“Wait, wait,” Reki blared into his ear as Langa kept moving deeper into the room, “the living room is the other way.”

“You can have my bed tonight. I wanted to put you in here last night, but I didn’t exactly make it here.”

“I can’t sleep in your bed!” Reki yelled again, and Langa stretched his neck to get away from the deafening noise.

“Why not?” Langa argued back, plopping Reki down on his bed. “You’re here now, and I’m not picking you up again, so good luck getting back to the living room.” 

“Where are you gonna sleep? Are we gonna share?”

“No, bonehead!” Langa rolled his eyes. He pointed to the dresser, next to the bedroom door. “I’ll sleep on the couch tonight. You need a real bed. My mom left a note over there while we were in the bathroom. She said your mom called and she’s coming to see you tomorrow, so I say you need better sleep than you would get on the couch. I don’t mind anyway.” 

“My mom…”

“Yeah, your mom!” Langa yelled back, leaping onto the bed to pull the blankets over Reki. He tucked him in up to his chin. “I know it’s still early, but…”

“I’m ready,” Reki mumbled. “I could sleep twenty more hours. I’m beat.”

“Okay, then,” Langa laughed, scooting off the bed and walking over to the window. He adjusted the blinds so that it was almost entirely dark in the room. “I’m still pretty tired, too, so I’ll probably go to bed soon, but yell if you need me. I’ll be on the couch.”

“Right.”

“See you in the morning, Reki.”

No response came, and Langa peered over from his spot by the door to see that Reki had already zonked out. Cleaning him up had clearly drained him so much more than Langa had realized, but he was happy that Reki had at least a little more normalcy with a bed and proper clothes. He would wake up in the morning feeling even better, Langa could feel it.

He moved closer to the bed and adjusted the blankets around Reki once more, then paused as the beating of Reki’s heart caught his attention. It was slow and peaceful, and his breaths were full and consistent. Langa was instantly taken back to the night ADAM had wreaked his havoc, and how he had done the same thing he was doing now to try and hold onto some sort of peace. It had done its job, then, but this time, Langa really believed the hope that he felt in Reki’s heartbeat. Langa left his hand on top of Reki’s heart for a long time, then brought his other hand up to his own, surprised to find they were beating at almost the same pace. Reki’s was slowing down as he fell into deeper and deeper sleep, but Langa could feel his own steadying as well.

Langa kept his hand over his heart as he quietly padded out of the room and closed the door. His mother had retreated to her own bedroom, leaving the living room and kitchen quiet enough that he almost imagined _hearing_ his heart beating as he pressed his palm against it. He sat down on the couch and pulled Reki’s blanket across his body, then lay down. His eyes were quickly drawn to his bedroom door, and he was shocked to feel his heartbeat elevate slightly, but its pace quickly settled again the longer Langa pressed his palm against his chest. He fell asleep to the rhythm of his heart, comforted by a part of his body that had been playing tricks on him and feeding his anxiety almost daily up to now. 

In their sleep, Langa and Reki’s heartbeats soon matched pace again. 


	8. Soar

The sound of hushed voices carried across the living room, and Langa opened his eyes to see his bedroom door bathed in golden morning sunlight. He sat up slowly and peered over the edge of the couch, locking eyes with his mother who was sitting at the kitchen table clutching a small mug of coffee. Across from her, sitting with her back to Langa, Reki’s mother continued whispering quietly.

“Oh, is Langa-kun awake?” she suddenly said a bit louder as she noticed Langa’s mother’s gaze shift away from her. She turned around and smiled. “Hello, Langa-kun! Sorry if I woke you up. I had to come over a little early.”

“No, it’s not a problem at all!” Langa blushed and stood up, waving his hands around in an attempt to assuage any guilt she might be feeling. He glanced down at his phone on the coffee table. “I should probably go and get ready for school.”

“Would you take this in to Reki for me?” Reki’s mother stood up and reached for a tote bag that had been leaning up against the side of the table. “I don’t want to wake him up if he’s still sleeping. It’s just some clothes and things, and the hospital staff found his cell phone and returned it to me. Surprisingly, it still works. I’m afraid he’ll have to wait for his birthday for a new one…”

“I’ll take it to him right now,” Langa said, nodding his head in a short bow as he scooped the bag out of her hands and turned towards his bedroom door. 

“Thank you,” Reki’s mother smiled again, then turned back to her conversation with Langa’s mother as he made his way to his bedroom.

Reki’s mother seemed much more composed than he had expected, so easily able to crack a smile, but maybe she had already talked through all of her emotions with his mom while he was asleep. It was weird to see his mom and Reki’s mom together, talking like old friends, but it also excited Langa. He didn’t know much about his mother’s social life since returning to Japan, and maybe it would be good for her to get to know Reki’s family. Maybe she would be a little more at ease and stop worrying about Langa so much, and could focus on caring for herself. Maybe Reki’s mom would even like him a little more if she knew his mom. 

Langa threw that whole thought process onto the back burner as he reached the door of his bedroom. He stopped and delicately planted his fingers on the doorknob, then turned it and pushed the door open as softly as he could manage. 

Thin strips of light poured between the blinds on the window, letting a soft pattern wash over Reki’s face as he still slept soundly. He hadn’t moved an inch except to turn his head to the side, the blankets still pulled up close to his chin as Langa had laid them last night. Langa crept up close to the bedside and deposited the bag on the floor in front of the nightstand, then moved quietly around the room to gather underclothes and his school uniform. He glanced again at Reki, breathing deeply, before slipping into the bathroom and willing the door to glide quietly shut. 

He had left towels scattered around the bathroom last night while focusing on getting Reki into the bedroom, so he went around scooping them up and hanging them as he brushed his teeth. He went back and spit into the sink before returning to the bathtub to retrieve the last towel, where Reki’s hospital gown still remained crumpled in a pile on the floor.

“I bet he’d want this thing to be set on fire or something,” Langa chuckled in a half-whisper. Yet he found himself kneeling down and neatly folding the gown before leaving it on the bathroom counter. He and Reki would brainstorm a terrible demise for the garment later, together. 

Langa changed and quickly finished going through his morning routine, then tried to match his earlier attempt at stealth as he crept back into the bedroom and tossed his old clothes into the laundry basket next to the bathroom door. He glanced down at his watch and cringed.

“Better get going,” Langa whispered, moving closer to the side of the bed. He peered down at Reki. “Guess you won’t be seeing me in the morning after all.”

He scanned his nightstand for the journal that he sometimes recorded his dreams in, then tore out a blank page and scribbled a note on it. Langa folded the paper so that it stood up, then left it on the corner of the nightstand so it would be the first thing Reki saw when he woke up. 

_ Hey, sleepyhead, I went to school, but I’ll text you later. Your mom was at the hospital and they gave her all the stuff you left behind. She seems happy. Get more sleep, I’ll see you in the evening. Your phone’s in the bag.  _

Langa had drawn a long arrow from the ending of that sentence down to the bottom edge of the paper. Hopefully Reki would have enough energy to sit up and scoop the bag into his lap to rifle through it.

Langa sighed and stepped back, offering a short wave before turning to leave the room, even though Reki was asleep and wouldn’t respond. It felt right to do, like an office employee kissing their half-asleep partner goodbye as they left to go to work in the morning.

“Weird analogy,” Langa whispered to himself, shaking his head as he headed through the bedroom door and out into the bright living room. 

***

The school day went by in a blur as Langa already felt the pressure of missing just one day’s worth of instruction. He couldn’t imagine how hard it would be for Reki to catch up once he was back in the classroom. He texted Reki once around lunch time, just asking how he was feeling, and received a short reply after the next class period had ended:  _ “Good. Hard to see keyboard, sorry.” _ Reki’s eyesight seemed to have improved over the last few days, but Langa shouldn’t have expected a miracle. 

Langa raced home after school, opting not to use his skateboard as his shoulders and legs still ached a little bit from the weekend’s unexpected events. His mother was in her bedroom when he got home, so he made a beeline directly to his own to see Reki.

Reki was still lying in bed, but he was awake and staring out the window. It was open, so Langa’s mother or maybe even Reki’s mother had been in the room while Langa was gone. Reki’s cell phone sat on the nightstand, the screen cracked in several places, and Langa’s note was sitting on top of it.

“I’m home,” Langa whispered from the door, and Reki smiled as he turned his head in Langa’s direction.

“Welcome back,” Reki beamed as Langa sat down on the edge of the bed. 

“You looked a little out-of-it just now. Were you thinking about something?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Reki looked down at his hands, then folded them across his stomach. “Searching might be a better way to describe it.”

“Searching?” Langa leaned forward, trying to focus Reki’s attention again.

“Mhm. For memories, or maybe they were dreams, I’m not sure. Everything’s all mixed together. There’s something just sitting there, in the back of my head, behind a wall or something. And, it’s like, I have this sledgehammer and I’m ready to go and break down the wall to get to it, but I can’t find the wall’s weak spot, you know?”

The terror ingrained in Reki’s face when he had woken up on the couch yesterday morning flashed through Langa’s mind. He had been so caught up in whatever he had been dreaming about that it had followed him into waking, and a tiny prick of fear had started to follow Langa around whenever Reki slept. He didn’t want Reki’s dreams to hurt him, nor the past. But shoving it all down into some dark corner of Reki’s mind would only make things worse.

“You have been dreaming,” Langa said softly, turning to look out the window. “About ADAM. Probably about the race. You wake up screaming sometimes, or muttering his name. I guess you don’t remember. You talk in your sleep, too.”

Langa turned as he felt Reki’s fingers stretch over his own and clamp down tight.

“The only thing I remember after waking up is this dread, this insanely crappy feeling that makes me feel like I can’t breathe. That’s probably me just actually not being able to breathe, though.” Reki let out a single laugh, then pulled his hand away from Langa. “Whatever, it’s a weird sensation, but I won’t let it bother me anymore.”

Langa felt himself reaching for Reki again, but he stopped himself. There was nothing he could do to make Reki feel better without helping him to unearth what had been eating at him in his dreams and memories, and Reki wasn’t ready to face that yet. How quickly he had dismissed it made that clearly evident.

“Did you get to talk with your mom today?” Langa said in place of prodding him further, willing some light to return to Reki’s faraway eyes. They darkened instead, and Reki sank back against the pillow.

“She was happy to see me, and I pretty much started bawling when she hugged me.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“She got a call from the school yesterday, and my attendance record is getting a little dicey.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve missed too much class. Even in the state I’m in, if I don’t start going to school again soon, I’ll have to repeat the grade once I’m all healed up.”

“What the hell? That’s bullshit! Don’t they understand what you’re going through?”

“It’s not about if they’re compassionate people or not. It’s just school policy. There was a girl in my class last year who got really sick and was out for over a month, and she got held back.”

“But what if I start bringing you the work to do at home? I’ll bring it back to school for you, too.”

“My mom asked if she could do that. It’s a policy thing, like I said.”

Langa grasped at a few of his curls as his elbows sank onto his knees. 

“One thing after another, huh?” he breathed. “Did they tell your mom how many days you have left?”

“Nope. Just said to try my best to make it back as soon as possible. I might as well try to go tomorrow.”

“Reki,” Langa sat up again and gripped both of his wrists. “That’s crazy. You can’t even walk. You can barely sit up straight. How are you gonna sit in one of those crappy desk chairs for eight hours every day? It’s not worth it! Just repeat the grade!”

Reki was silent for a moment, a pink tint spreading across his cheeks, and he let his gaze fall from Langa’s.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” Langa said, pulling away from the cast on Reki’s arm.

“That’s not it. I’m fine.” Reki shook his head. “I don’t want to repeat the grade, Langa. Being in the same class with you makes going to school more bearable, and I want to stay with you. Even if we don’t end up in the same class next year, we’ll still see each other around and learn about the same things. I don’t want to be left behind.”

Langa wanted to smack Reki on the head for being so stubborn, but his frustration all melted away at Reki’s explanation. He hadn’t really processed that yet: he wouldn’t have Reki at his side anymore and it would be like starting all over again, trying to make friends.

“What did your mom say? Did you explain that to her?”

“Not in so many words, but yes. She came up with an idea. It’s kinda a lot to ask of you, though.”

“Reki, you already know what I’m going to say.”

“Maybe you won’t be so certain after I tell you.” Reki huffed out a large breath of air, then straightened up and locked eyes with Langa before continuing.

“My mom suggested that I stay here with you for a little while, at least until my legs heal enough to walk with crutches. That shouldn’t be more than a few weeks. She thought since we’re both going to the same place, you could help me get to school. I know I’m being really intrusive and expecting too much of you, but she’s worried that I won’t manage well if I’m at home. My sisters are so young that they take up a lot of her attention, and I don’t want to make her balance them and me and spread herself too thin, and money’s tight so getting a wheelchair is out of the question, plus the school doesn’t even have an elevator so she’d have to waste even more of her time bringing me up to the classroom and that would mess with her schedule and taking care of the family and--”

“Reki, stop.” Langa grabbed his shoulders. “You need to slow down or you’re not gonna be able to breathe. Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, you can stay here as long as you need. I would probably be coming over to your house to walk you to school everyday anyway, so this makes it easier for me, too.”

“Oh, don’t lie. You’ve gotta be sick of taking care of me by now.”

“You’re such an idiot,” Langa sighed deeply and lowered his head onto Reki’s shoulder. “I thought I got it through your thick skull last night, but apparently not. I would do anything for you. Every minute we’re together is precious, no matter what we’re doing. You’ve taught me to feel so many feelings I’d shut away before I came here. You’ve taught me how to love the things I do again. Seeing you hurt like this is painful, but it makes me want to protect you. If I can, I will.”

He felt Reki’s fingers press against the back of his head, and then the weight of Reki’s head pressed down on top of his. Reki was silent, but sniffling slightly, and Langa knew he was crying again. He couldn’t understand what had made Reki so resistant to the idea that he could be loved and cared for. Reki hadn’t been like this before. Something in his interaction with ADAM, or in the dreams that followed in all the time after, had changed how he saw himself. How he saw Langa. 

“I’m worried about you, Reki,” he said into his shoulder. “I’m here by your side, okay?” As soon as he voiced his fear, Reki’s shoulder started shaking violently. 

Langa pulled back and scooped Reki’s head into his own arms, pressing him to himself even tighter than he had the night before. Langa decided he wouldn’t continue voicing his train of thought. At least Reki hadn’t surrendered to whatever doubts were floating around in his head. At least he let himself be reasoned with. He still believed in Langa in his heart, even if his brain was too jumbled up to make sense of anything. Langa could tell that much as Reki’s body stilled and he breathed softly into his shoulder, allowing his tears to dry as he slowly became enveloped in Langa’s warmth. 

“You can count on me,” Langa said into the top of Reki’s head after several minutes of silence had indicated that Reki had calmed down. “Why don’t you get some more sleep? I’ll wake you up for dinner, okay?”

Langa felt Reki’s head move against his shoulder as he nodded, and Langa pushed him back against the pillow and pulled the blankets up around him again. Reki smiled at Langa, his eyes rimmed with red and his cheeks still damp. 

“I have some homework to work on and I was thinking maybe I’d do it in here at my desk. Or do you want me to go out in the kitchen?”

“Stay here. If you want to…”

“I don’t want any more wishy-washiness from you, Reki. I’ll stay because I want to. But I want to know what you want, too.”

Langa scooped up his book bag from the floor and plodded over to the desk, then quietly began taking out notes and books and slipped on his headphones. He worked for a few minutes, then turned around in his chair to check on Reki, a habit that was quickly developing each time Reki went to sleep. 

But Reki’s eyes were still open. He had been watching Langa work. There was an unreadable expression on his face, like he was lost in thought again, and his eyes widened as Langa’s eyes met them. He waved awkwardly as Langa pulled off his headphones, then shut his eyes and rolled onto his side before Langa had the chance to say anything.

“Sleeping that way’s not good for you. It doesn’t hurt?”

“I prefer sleeping on my side and I haven’t done it in weeks. No wonder I have terrible dreams.” 

“Don’t make me come over there and drag you onto your back.”

“Just do your homework,” Reki said sternly. But he was holding back a smile, and he buried his face in the pillow to hide it. 

Langa shook his head and laughed before slipping his headphones back on. He couldn’t tell what was real anymore, bouncing back and forth between laughing and crying with the boy falling asleep behind him, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know everything about Reki, to help him feel normal again for his own sake as much as Reki’s, but it was still too soon. Maybe tomorrow things would change, as they stepped back into their normal world carrying the baggage of everything terribly extraordinary that had reshaped everything they knew. Langa cranked up the volume on his headphones, drowning his thoughts in noise, as he leaned over his ordinary problems and got to work solving them again.

***

Langa rolled off the couch with a groan, his back stiff from a second night spent there, but he readjusted his attitude and cut off all complaints as he headed towards his bedroom door. The night before, when he had mentioned Reki’s idea to his mother over dinner, she had explained that she was already in the process of looking for a futon to spread out on the floor in Langa’s room. It would be much better than the couch, she explained, and she was excited to have her son experience a part of Japanese culture that he hadn’t yet. Reki had insisted he sleep on it, and return Langa’s bed to him, but both of the Hasegawa family members barked a strong “No!” at him and he quickly shut up. 

Now, Langa was surprised to see Reki already awake as he opened the door to his room. He had dug his school uniform out of his mother’s tote bag and had the jacket and pants laid out on the bed beside him. He had somehow managed to slip a clean t-shirt over his head, but was struggling with the button down after exhausting all his energy. 

“Let me help!” Langa scolded as he raced into the room. “You’re gonna tire yourself out, and you have a long day ahead of you.”

“Well, good morning to you, too,” Reki huffed, dropping his arms with the shirt pulled only halfway up his casted arm and the rest hanging loosely off his body. Langa pulled the shirt the rest of the way over the cast and held it out for Reki to slip his other arm through, then buttoned it up for him.

“I hate to break it to you, but there’s no way you’re getting these pants over that chunky cast of yours,” Langa said, holding up the pants. He tossed them back inside the tote bag and started digging around. “Here we go.”

“Sweatpants? I can’t wear those!”

“Hey, they’re nice! They’re black, they have pockets, no crazy designs on them… If people don’t look too closely they won’t even notice you’re not wearing the uniform.”

“Langa…” Reki pouted. “You really think people won’t be staring at me? I haven’t been in school for over a month and I was in a coma and a  _ landslide  _ caused by an _ earthquake _ . I can hear the gossip ringing in my ears already.”

“Well, then they’ll be staring at me, too, because I’ll be carrying you around everywhere. We’re in the same boat, my friend.”

Langa threw the sweatpants at Reki and continued to rifle around in the bag as Reki slipped out of his shorts and put them on, then rolled up the right pant leg to uncover his cast.

“Nice work doing that by yourself,” Langa complimented, glancing at the fully clothed Reki.

“Yeah, thanks. You gonna sign this, or what?” Reki joked, but Langa became caught up in searching again and didn’t respond. “What are you looking for?”

“Here it is!” Langa shouted, pulling something small out of the bag. “You can’t go to school without your bandana, Reki! Wow, it looks brand new.” 

“Oh, that.” Reki frowned and stared down at his cast. “My mom told me not to wear that for a while, until I get my stitches out. They need to ‘breathe’ or whatever.”

“Oh… well, that’s fine.” Langa smiled and put the bandana back in the bag, laying it atop the rest of Reki’s clothes. “Anyway, do you actually want me to sign the cast?”

“God, no!” Reki laughed, distracted for the moment. “We’d get even more stares! But we might get them anyway, since we couldn’t get this blood off…”

“I have an idea!” Langa declared, scooping Reki up and heading to the bathroom.

He set Reki down on the bathroom counter, right next to the sink, and handed him a toothbrush. As Reki and Langa both brushed their teeth, Langa rifled around in the drawers of his bathroom vanity.

“Here!” he said through a mouthful of toothpaste, then spit into the sink. “Some bandages. We can just wrap them around the spots that have blood on them.”

He knelt and began wrapping the bandages around Reki’s leg as Reki finished brushing and spit into the sink.

“By the way,” Langa asked, “where’s your backpack? Your mom didn’t drop it off with your other stuff.”

“She said she was going to take it to the school for me yesterday. Hopefully it’s there, otherwise I’ll just be sitting at my desk, twiddling my thumbs.” 

“It’s there. Your mom seems busy, but she definitely has her shit together. I’m gonna go grab mine, wait here and I’ll come back and get you.”

Langa tossed the leftover bandages back in the drawer and left Reki sitting on the bathroom counter to return to his room. He made his way over to the desk, where he had left his things scattered the night before when he went to help prepare dinner, so as not to wake Reki with all the paper shuffling. He began slipping things back into his bag and turned back towards the bathroom door when a loud thud and a sharp “Tch!” made him freeze.

“Reki?!” Langa ran back into the bathroom, abandoning the backpack in the middle of the room. 

“Don’t freak, I’m fine,” Reki shouted back, but he was on the floor when Langa entered, struggling to prop himself up on his good elbow. 

“What the hell happened? I was gone for less than a minute!” Langa fumed, but he quickly reigned in his emotions and helped Reki sit up. 

“It was just me being stupid,” Reki shook his head. “I figured, you know, all that’s wrong with my left leg is that I have a cut, and it’s sewed up pretty good, so putting weight on it would be fine. Then you wouldn’t have to carry me, just, I don’t know, support me instead, I guess?”

“But it hurt.”

“More than I thought it would, actually,” Reki laughed, and Langa rubbed at his eyes. He pulled back to see Reki staring worriedly at him. “I’m fine though, really! Let’s just get going, who knows how long it’ll take to get there,” he added nervously. 

“Right.”

Langa scooped Reki up and placed him on the counter again, then turned around and helped him slide onto his back. He moved out into the bedroom and stooped to pick up his backpack, carrying it by the handle with one hand while he supported Reki with the other. 

“Bye, Mom!” Langa called as they moved out into the living room and towards the front door.

“Bye, Mrs. Hasegawa!” Reki called over Langa’s shoulder, and her head popped out of her bedroom door.

“I wanted to see you boys off!” she squealed, tying a bathrobe around herself before stepping out into the living room. “Reki-kun, you’ll need your strength! But there’s no time for a proper breakfast. At least take some fruit!” 

She rushed over to the kitchen and rummaged around, pulling out an apple and a banana. 

“Please be careful,” she pleaded as she handed the fruit to Reki, who had free hands as Langa supported him. “You two are a bit of an odd sight, but what can we do? The circumstances are outside of our control…”

“Love you, Mom,” Langa said, and he moved carefully out the door and down the porch steps to the street below.

“Are we gonna skateboard today?” Reki chirped excitedly, tickling Langa’s ear with his breath.

“Let’s just start with walking. We can work our way up to it.”

“Fair,” Reki replied, but there was a hint of disappointment in his voice.

“We will, I promise.”

They were quiet as they walked, Reki munching on the banana and doing his best not to do it directly in Langa’s ear. Langa would eat his apple when he got to school. When they arrived, the other students streaming into the school courtyard kept their distance. The classroom, however, was a completely different story.

“Oh my god, Kyan-kun!” a high-pitched cry was the first thing the two boys heard as Langa slid open the door to their Year 2 classroom. The girl in question flocked over to them, and a crowd of their classmates followed in her wake.

“Hi,” Reki said quietly, his cheeks bright red. 

“What happened to you?” A boy who usually talked with them between classes asked.

“Long story,” Langa interjected, and pushed through the crowd to deposit Reki carefully at his desk next to the window. Several girls followed and swarmed around Reki as soon as Langa stepped away.

“Oh, you poor thing! Look at your forehead!”

“Hana-chan, did you see his leg?”

“What about his arm?!”

“Um…” Reki’s voice was drowned out by the girls, and now the boys that were also beginning to crowd around him.

“Woah, dude, your eye looks nasty! What did you do to yourself?!”

“Knock it off!” Langa suddenly shouted at the top of his lungs, and the class froze. They all backed away from Reki’s desk as Langa moved closer to it.

“Geez, dude,” the first boy to speak stammered again. “Good thing Reki’s back. You’re way too aggressive.”

Langa ignored him and sat down at his own desk next to Reki’s, staring straight ahead. The crowd dispersed as idle chatter resumed and students began to take their seats. Langa glanced over at Reki and saw sweat beading on his forehead.

“Thanks, Langa,” he whispered, leaning over a bit in his direction. “I expected some comments, but that was overwhelming.”

“No problem.” Langa plucked his apple off of Reki’s desk and gave it a good cleaning, then started munching on it as he waited for class to begin. He continued watching Reki, who had turned to look out the window. Filling the void he was meant to fill, in the place he belonged.

When the homeroom teacher walked in with Reki’s backpack, another round of spitfire questions started up. But Langa sat back and relaxed, and even joined Reki in laughing as they watched the teacher trying to conduct the chaos, walking back and handing the bag to Reki. It wasn’t his problem anymore, or Reki’s, and it was an amazing feeling. 

The amazing feeling followed Langa throughout his day as well, with every glance in Reki’s direction firing him up even more. Reki often looked confused in class, having fallen behind so much, and he was constantly flipping through pages of old material that the class had been tested on already while he was gone, but he still looked happy to be there. Around the time lunch rolled around, though, some of his enthusiasm was gone.

As soon as the teacher walked out of the room in their last class before lunch, Langa turned in his seat to focus on Reki, who was pouring over their textbook but having a hard time reading it. 

“How are you holding up?”

Reki looked up and stared behind Langa briefly before focusing on his face. He closed the textbook and sat back against the chair, sighing despite how hard he tried to hide it.

“It’s great to be back, but honestly, I’m struggling to stay awake. I don’t know if it’s boredom or exhaustion, or both.”

“You seemed like you were zoning out earlier.”

“Prolly was.” Reki yawned, then slapped his hand over his mouth. “I can’t let myself get more tired.”

“Maybe you should rest for a little. I’m sure the nurse would let you take one of the beds in the infirmary.”

“No,” Reki said resolutely, sitting up straight in the chair again. “Catching up in all my classes is gonna be a major headache, and I don’t want it to pile up even more.” 

“Don’t push yourself too hard,” Langa said as he stood up, placing a hand on Reki’s shoulder. “I’m gonna go buy us some lunch and bring it back here. I know we usually go out on the roof, but you shouldn’t move around more than you have to.”

“The classroom’s okay,” Reki smiled up at Langa. “Don’t take too long. I won’t be able to fend off the swarming classmates without you for long.”

Langa laughed as he walked away, glancing back at one point to see girls already making a beeline for Reki’s desk as he was reopening his textbook. He let his smile fall and forced his feet to move faster.

***

A few more days passed in much the same fashion, Langa still not having enough courage to try the skateboard stunt again no matter how much Reki pleaded. Students still clustered around Reki’s desk during passing periods, but they visited less frequently as the week went on, and as Langa hovered closer to Reki. Reki still seemed just as confused in class, even when Langa spent hours after school trying to re-teach the topics to him. But without the foundations that he had missed, the new material was impossible to comprehend, and Reki had decided to delay starting his makeup work until the weekend. Between school and re-learning with Langa, all Reki could do was sleep. Langa kept trying to find a time for Reki to talk with the guys, who were constantly texting and asking for updates along with Sayomi, but Reki was asleep the moment Langa left him alone for more than a second. 

Friday rolled around, and Langa was tasked with some of the classroom duties for the day. He had tried to switch with another classmate the day before, when he heard he’d been assigned them, because that meant leaving Reki alone for more time than usual, but classmates had been distant with Langa since his outburst on Wednesday morning. Langa didn’t want to believe it, but they had been cold to him since long before that. He had shut them out himself in his worry over Reki, pulling away from school life altogether and rushing to the hospital every day. 

And the task that Langa had been charged with today was a doozy: trash disposal. Their classroom was on the exact opposite side of the school from where the dumpsters were, meaning Langa would have to traverse several buildings to dispose of the week’s worth of trash. Thankfully, someone else was assigned burnables and would be accompanying him.

It was the same guy who had pointed out Langa’s change in behavior after he tried to shoo everyone away from Reki, and Langa felt incredibly awkward traversing the silent halls with him while everyone else in the classroom managed other tasks. Reki was off the hook today on account of his physical condition, and Langa couldn’t help but think about how that would make him feel useless again, rather than relieved. He moved quickly, wanting to return to the room and Reki’s side, but the other boy seemed to be taking his sweet time on their way back to the classroom.

“Listen, Hasegawa,” he started quietly. “Sorry for jumping on you the other day. Reki looked like hell, so you were probably pretty on edge with everyone around. But what made you guys so close in the first place? I’ve known him for a few years now and he took to you real fast when you showed up.”

“Don’t ask me, ask him,” Langa mumbled, walking fast enough that the other boy had to jog to match his step again. 

“I already tried, yesterday after you asked Hiro to switch chores with you. He didn’t say much. He’s been really quiet since coming back.”

“Well, we’ve got a lot going on.”

“We?” The other boy stopped in the middle of the hallway. 

“He. He does.” Langa shook his head and sped up again. 

“Okay, whatever,” the boy continued, moving again. “The point is, I’m sorry. Let’s just be friends again. I missed talking with you guys between classes, so I’m happy Reki’s back and you’re… more engaged.”

As he fell silent, they made it back to the classroom. Langa glanced over to see Reki looming over a textbook at his desk, doing his best to be oblivious to the flurry of other students around him cleaning and organizing the classroom. 

“Thanks,” Langa replied, not taking his eyes off Reki. “He’ll be his old self again soon, I think, and things’ll go back to normal. He just needs time. I guess I do, too.”

The other boy nodded and they parted ways, Langa heading straight for Reki. He wanted to yell across the room for Reki to sit up a little straighter, so he wouldn’t accidentally irritate something, but he knew Reki would be so embarrassed if other classmates heard. Langa didn’t want to get lumped in with any cringey mom stories Reki might tell in the future, so he just kept silent and quickened his pace. Reki leaned over a little further, and Langa bit down on his tongue to hold himself back. Then Reki’s eyes closed, and Langa understood what was happening.

Reki began to sway from side to side in his chair, his head drooping lower and lower, and Langa started shoving people out of his way. 

“What’s wrong with you?” a small girl shouted, but Langa zipped past her and ignored her every word. 

“Reki!” he screamed, and caught his hand just as Reki’s body toppled over. Langa was too late, and Reki’s face smashed into the wall just below the window as his left shoulder made a hard impact with the hardwood floor. A girl who had been cleaning the window beside him screamed and backed away. 

“Reki! Reki!” Langa screamed again, scrambling over the seat and throwing Reki’s arm over his shoulder before pulling him away from the wall. 

The entire class watched silently as Langa sat down on the ground and rested Reki’s head in his lap. One girl ran out of the room in search of help, but Langa didn’t even notice. He kept on muttering Reki’s name as his shaky fingers reached out to touch Reki’s forehead. Fresh blood was slowly seeping out between his stitches in several spots. 

“Langa, it’s okay,” Reki’s voice suddenly flooded into Langa’s ears, and he pressed closer to him as Reki’s eyes slowly opened. “I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not!” Langa shouted, and he held Reki down instinctively, knowing he would try to sit up. 

“I just fell asleep for a second,” Reki tried to argue, his feeble, shaky voice playing no tricks on Langa.

“You’re sick, Reki. Your forehead is burning up. You’ve been feeling bad from the start, haven’t you? From the first day back at school?”

Reki didn’t say anything, and Langa cursed. He could feel his own body shaking, and he knew Reki could feel it by the way his eyes slowly trailed up to meet Langa’s. 

“You should take him to the nurse,” a small voice piped up behind Langa’s ear, and Hana, the girl who had been washing the window, scooted in between him and the wall. She pulled a small handkerchief out of the pocket of her sweater and pressed it to Reki’s forehead, then placed Langa’s hand on top of it.

“No, I’m fine,” Reki argued, but Langa was already moving. 

He scooped Reki up and pressed him against his chest, pinning the handkerchief between Reki’s forehead and his own shoulder, and bolted for the door. He ran down the hall, his classmates staring from the doorway behind him. 

The nurse looked horrified when Langa burst into her office, assuming that Reki’s existing bruising and damage to his eye had just happened. But she quickly found her composure again as Langa laid Reki down on one of the infirmary beds and she noticed the fading color on the edges of many of his bruises.

“So you’re Kyan Reki, the kid they told me to watch out for,” she stammered softly, then turned to Langa pacing around beside her. “Sit down, kid, you’re giving me chest pains. I can’t work like that.”

Langa did as he was told, but instead of sitting in the chair that the nurse pointed to, he marched straight over to the bed and sat down on the edge, taking hold of Reki’s hand and refusing to let go even as Reki asked him to.

“The nurse can do her job, I’m not in the way,” he growled, unable to contain his anger. He was so incredibly mad at Reki for hiding how he had been feeling, but the rage was overtaken entirely by mind-boggling anxiety.

Reki fell silent, and the nurse started rummaging around for bandages and gauze.

“Reki-kun, wanna tell me what happened?”

“I passed out at my desk and slammed into a wall.”

“See?” Langa berated. “You didn’t fall asleep, you lost consciousness! There’s a difference!”

“It was only for a few seconds, I think,” Reki said quietly as the nurse returned and started looking at his forehead. 

“Honey, what’s your name?” the nurse asked, peering up at Langa.

“Langa,” Reki replied in his place.

“Langa-kun, it seems like you and Reki-kun have some things to talk about, but maybe you can wait until I’m not in the room? It’s a bit distracting. Plus, I think Reki-kun will be fine. There’s a little blood, but the stitches that are already here are doing their job. He’s got a bit of a fever, so I have my suspicions about what’s up. It’s nothing to be worried about yet.”

_ Yet? _

Langa kept silent as the nurse patched up Reki’s forehead and shone a small flashlight in his eyes, checking for a concussion. 

“Alright,” she said, pulling back and reading from a small stack of papers on her desk. Langa could just make out Reki’s student ID photograph clipped to the top of it. The nurse had kept Reki’s file in her office, just in case he had a hard time readjusting to school? “I think you’re going through morphine withdrawal,” she said simply, clapping her hands together.

Langa’s face paled. Of course, how could he have been so stupid? Reki had had that drug pumped through his system for weeks, and then had gone off it cold turkey when he got to Langa’s house, like it was nothing. He didn’t know much about medicine, but he knew that quitting morphine like any other drug was not something you should ever do. It had to be gradual. He remembered Sayomi voicing a concern like that when he had gone to get morphine from the tent in the hospital parking lot, and Langa cursed himself for being so careless. Still, he had to be sure.

“What makes you say that?” he whispered.

“Well, fever is a common symptom. In addition to that, there’s shaking and sweating, which I see here.” She pointed, and Reki held up his hand to see subtle tremors moving through it. “That could get worse in the coming days. Any other weird things going on, Reki-kun? Yawning, achiness, anxiety?”

_ The anxiety is a given, but I don’t think it’s related…  _ Langa thought, then jumped to his feet.

“You’ve been yawning all week!”

“Thank you, Langa-kun. Please, relax.” She turned away from him, and Langa sunk back onto the bed again. “Reki-kun, your symptoms aren’t extreme right now, but they might get worse. For now, just take an over-the-counter medicine to manage your fever, drink lots of water, and do your best to get some sort of exercise. It will help your mind and body get back on track. If you develop things like vomiting or,” she glanced back at Langa,” hallucinations or seizures, go to the emergency room immediately. They’ll give you more serious drugs there to help manage withdrawal.”

“I should take you home right now,” Langa said as the nurse moved away to attend to some charts.

“Please don’t,” Reki pleaded. “I don’t actually feel all that bad. You should just go back to class and I’ll sleep it off here. She said I need exercise, so… I was thinking we could go to the skate park after school. I haven’t been there in ages, and maybe Shadow and Miya would want to meet us there if they’re free.”

“Are you crazy?” Langa asked, letting his incredulousness show plainly on his face as his mouth dropped. 

“Please, Langa. I want you to have fun skating like you used to do. I’ll just watch. Being out in the open air will be good for me.”

“Oh my god,” Langa sighed. He rested his hand on Reki’s forehead for a long moment without speaking, and the longer he stared at Reki, the harder Reki tried to adopt huge, puppy dog eyes. Reki’s forehead was definitely still hot, but his amber eyes were drilling into Langa’s soul. He snatched his hand away. “Fine. You win. But we leave when I say it’s time to leave, even if that’s five minutes after we get there.”

“Thank you, Langa,” Reki chimed in a sing-songy voice. 

“Please, act a little more serious,” Langa said, ruffling Reki’s hair. 

He left Reki to get some sleep and headed back to the classroom, sending a quick invitation to Shadow and Miya over text message to join them at the park. He added Joe and Cherry, too, but knew they wouldn’t be able to make it even if they wanted to come. 

His classmates exchanged looks as Langa entered, in the middle of the introduction of the Modern Japanese professor’s lecture. Langa took his seat and stared at Reki’s desk, then noticed a spot of his blood on the wall beyond. Langa was just about to bite his tongue again to keep from tearing up, when the sound of paper scratching lightly against wood drew his attention down to his desk. A piece of paper had been wadded up into a ball and thrown onto it. Langa unfolded it.

_ Is Reki okay? _

He looked up to see several members of the class staring back at him, risking getting noticed by the professor, including Hana, Hiro, and Kazuya, the boy who had done classroom tasks with Langa less than an hour before. Langa smiled and nodded, and they all smiled back before turning to face the front again. 

He looked down again just as his phone vibrated, and he slipped it under the desk to read first a message from Miya, “ _ I’m in!” _ , and then a message from Shadow,  _ “I’m down!”  _ A minute later, a message came through from Joe, a picture. He and Cherry were together, boards in hand. The attached message read:  _ “We took the afternoon off, we’ll see you there!” _

***

It was the first thing Langa said as soon as he returned to the infirmary at the end of the day. Reki was asleep, and Langa sat down on the bed and tapped lightly at his shoulder before sticking his phone in front of his face.

“Reki, look,” he whispered. “Joe and Cherry will be there, too.”

Reki opened one eye, then the other, as he adjusted to the bright phone screen, but his face lit up with a smile instantly. 

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” 

“Are you sure you want to?”

“Yes, come on, pick me up already! I’ll walk there myself if you don’t get moving!”

“That’s  _ not  _ happening,” Langa said authoritatively before standing up and squatting down for Reki to slide onto his back.

Reki’s face was still hot as it pressed close to Langa’s, but he chose not to say anything. He would keep a close eye on Reki and cut off the fun at the right time, and everything would be fine. Reki was more excited in this moment than Langa had seen him in a long time, and if he said he could handle being out and about, Langa would have to trust him. At this point, Langa didn’t see any way Reki would recover fully if he didn’t find his way back to the things he enjoyed in life, and this had to be step one in that process. 

Langa moved as fast as he could down the hallway and the stairs, then out to the school courtyard. He swiped his skateboard from the bike rack where he had left it, and finally, Reki convinced him to get on it. He skated with Reki holding tight to his back, moving so slowly that Reki kept yelling for him to pick up the pace.

“Yes! The wind in my hair! The bumpy ground, the sound of the wheels hitting it again and again! I missed you so much!” Reki screamed, throwing up his left arm as he held onto Langa with his right, letting the wind weave through his fingers.

“Put that down! It’s still broken, you know!” Langa screamed above the wind’s whooshing. His voice was wobbly as he tried to maintain balance, but part of it also came from the laughing bubbling up in his chest. 

They arrived at the skate park with Langa almost in tears, howling with laughter at how Reki had taken control of the situation, pulling on Langa’s hair to make him go one direction, thrusting an arm forward to get him to speed up, and clutching tightly around his neck, almost choking the life out of him, when Langa eventually went too fast. 

At the sight of both boys laughing hysterically, Shadow and Miya came running over from where they had been waiting, Cherry and Joe trailing after them. Langa had just enough time to plop Reki down on a bench before Miya was on top of him, arms around his neck and cheek pressed to his.

“Reki!!” Miya howled, so much more emotional than any of them had ever seen him. Langa pried him off and set him down on the bench next to Reki.

“No climbing on the injury-prone idiot,” he berated sarcastically, and glanced at Reki to make sure he was okay. 

Reki was smiling from ear to ear, a sort of glowiness appearing on his face as the others took their turns carefully hugging him. Then everyone turned on Langa and barraged him with hugs, ending up in a pile on the ground at Reki’s feet.

“Ouch,” Langa mumbled.

“Let’s go!” Miya yelled. “Reki, there’re so many tricks I’ve learned that you have to see! I want your feedback, hold nothing back.”

“Okay,” Reki nodded.

Miya jumped on his board and started moving, then swiped at Langa’s arm and pulled him, running, after him towards the ramp. 

“Hang on!” Langa shouted, and slowed to a stop as Miya circled back on his board. Langa dropped his backpack in front of the bench and began rifling through it, then pulled out a water bottle.

“Have you had any water since earlier?” He handed the bottle to Reki, who half-smiled as he took it from him. Langa waited for Reki to unscrew the cap and take a sip before getting on his board and following Miya, Shadow, and Cherry over to the ramp. 

“What’s got him worked up?” Langa heard Joe say over his shoulder, and he peered behind him to see Joe take a seat next to Reki. 

Langa began skating around the flatter areas of the park, getting a feel for some of the old tricks he hadn’t done in a long time, as he listened to their conversation. He knew he shouldn’t, but he had become so involved in Reki’s world, especially over the last few days, that it was hard not to.

“I’m sort of sick,” Reki replied, and Langa almost fell forward off his skateboard at Reki’s blatant honesty. “You good?!” Reki yelled, and Langa gave him a thumbs up before steadying himself.

“Sick how?” Joe brought Reki back to their conversation, and he took his eyes off Langa.

“Well, the school nurse told me I’m going through morphine withdrawal.” He held his hands out in front of him, the water in the bottle rippling in response to their shakiness. “See? It’s not too bad though. Just gotta rest up more, like I want more of that. I just want to get back out there.” Langa looked away as Reki’s eyes found their way to him again.

“You will,” Joe murmured. “And until then, we need your other talent.”

“Other talent?”

“You’re a genius woodworker, Reki. Best guy around for designing a board. And mine has seen better days. I would be honored to have you design a new one for me.” He glanced down at Reki’s arm. “No rush on it, though. And I’d be happy to help in actually constructing it, if you want it. I’d like to learn more about that process.”

Langa smiled as he watched Reki’s face light up again, and he decided to focus on getting back into the groove of skating again. He wanted Joe’s new board to be a surprise to him, too, to see the amazing work that Reki would put into it only at the end, when it was complete and Reki was satisfied. As Joe and Reki leaned in closer to each other and started whispering, Reki’s voice rising in waves of excitement, Langa turned and faced the ramp.

“It’s been a while,” he said under his breath. “But let’s do this.”

He let one foot pound against the ground as he shot towards the ramp, then let speed take him forward as he flew up and twisted in the air. From up high, he could still see the amber of Reki’s eyes and his ecstatic smile. 

_ Drink more water! _ Langa shouted in his head, but he kept his mouth shut as the sky enveloped him.

He soared back towards the ground, a newfound invigoration coursing through his veins. He hoped Reki would ask to come back here again tomorrow. 

**Author's Note:**

> Fanfic Tumblr: beccerslynnfics  
> Main Tumblr: beccerslynn97


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